Vision-language models must reconcile visual evidence with memorized world knowledge when the two conflict. How they resolve this conflict shapes the reliability of multimodal systems, yet prior work characterizes it behaviorally without a component-level causal account. We combine activation patching across three granularities (residual stream, attention heads, and MLP sublayers) with model-component ablation studies and mechanistic analysis. Across three VLM families, we find that visual grounding emerges by default, whereas prior grounding depends on a small set of causally necessary attention heads (2.5-4.8%) concentrated in the second half of the network. These heads enable answers from stored world knowledge (e.g., "red" for a strawberry) despite conflicting visual input. Ablating them flips predictions from knowledge-grounded to visually grounded answers in 68-96% of cases under prior-knowledge prompts, but changes only 0.8-7.5% of visually grounded predictions, establishing an asymmetric causal structure. The identified heads decompose into routing heads, which modulate information flow, and writing heads, which directly project answer tokens into the residual stream. This structure is consistent across model families and scales, revealing a sparse causal circuit underlying perception-knowledge conflict in VLMs.

The transition from static chat bots to autonomous agents--equipped with persistent memory, tool-use protocols, and multi-agent collaboration--has fundamentally expanded the AI threat landscape. Current defense mechanisms, such as perimeter security and training-time alignment, remain external to the agent's active reasoning loop. Consequently, they fall short: a fully aligned agent remains highly vulnerable to runtime hijacking via memory poisoning, tool-chain manipulation, or multi-agent protocol attacks. To address this critical gap, we introduce the Agent-Native Immune System (ANIS), the first biologically inspired, endogenous defense architecture embedded directly within the agent's cognitive loop. Our framework presents four primary contributions. First, we design a six-layer Immune Tower (L0-L5), distinctly incorporating Barrier Immunity (L1) as a non-cognitive, physical-and-logical isolation layer. Second, we establish a unified taxonomy of Agent Viruses and Agent Vaccines, formalizing the critical distinction between superficial non-parametric defenses and robust parametric vaccines. Third, we conceptualize the Harness Triad--Meta, Self, and Auto--a self-monitoring, meta-cognitive automation backbone that drives Continual Immune Learning (CIL), enabling vaccines to dynamically adapt to novel threats. Finally, we establish a rigorous theoretical demarcation between model alignment and agent immunity: while alignment provides a static "constitutional" value foundation during training, ANIS serves as the dynamic "law enforcement" mechanism during runtime. We conclude by framing open challenges for the field, including immune protocol standardization, novel evaluation metrics such as the Autoimmunity Rate (false-positive intervention rate), and the co-evolutionary dynamics between pathogens and vaccines within collective intelligence ecosystems.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a promising paradigm for mitigating distribution shifts in deep models. However, existing TTA approaches for anomaly segmentation remain limited by their reliance on pixel-level heuristics, such as confidence thresholding or entropy minimisation, which fail to preserve structural consistency under noise and texture variation. Moreover, they typically treat anomaly maps as flat intensity fields, ignoring the higher-order spatial relationships that characterise complex defect geometries. We introduce TopoTTA (Topological Test-Time Adaptation), a novel framework that integrates persistent homology, a tool from topological data analysis, into the TTA pipeline to enforce geometric and structural coherence during adaptation. By applying multi-level cubical complex filtration to anomaly score maps, TopoTTA derives robust topological pseudo-labels that guide a lightweight test-time classifier, enhancing segmentation quality without retraining the backbone model. The approach avoids reliance on method-specific raw-score thresholding for mask binarisation, preserves connectivity, and generalises across both 2D and 3D modalities. Extensive experiments across six standard benchmarks (MVTec AD, VisA, Real-IAD, MVTec 3D-AD, AnomalyShapeNet, and MVTec LOCO) demonstrate an average 15% F1 improvement over state-of-the-art unsupervised anomaly detection and segmentation methods, with the largest gains on anomalies exhibiting complex geometric or structural variations. These findings suggest that integrating topological reasoning into test-time adaptation provides a principled route to structure-aware generalisation, bridging the gap between geometric learning and robust adaptation.

Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning (RSICC) aims to describe changes between bi-temporal remote sensing images and holds significant research and application value. However, most existing methods rely on conventional deep learning architectures, and the limited model capacity constrains performance. Although large-model post-training techniques have achieved great success in general domains, their direct transfer to RSICC remains challenging due to data scarcity and the need for fine-grained change understanding. To address this, we propose RSICCLLM, the first post-training framework for large vision-language models in RSICC. Specifically, we design a data generation paradigm, release the instruction dataset RSICI, and establish a task-specific RSICC benchmark. We further introduce Difference-aware Supervised Fine-tuning to explicitly extract change representations and guide the model in perceiving and understanding temporal differences. In addition, we propose Dual-Negative Preference Optimization (DNPO), which employs two complementary negative-sample construction strategies to construct the preference dataset RSICP and further refine model performance. Extensive experiments validate the superior capability of RSICCLLM, which achieves outstanding results with only 7B parameters, surpassing models of substantially larger scales. The code and dataset will be made publicly available at this https URL.

Quadruped robots have achieved remarkable locomotion, yet their behavioral repertoire remains confined to a few gaits--far from the expressive, companion-like presence long envisioned for them. Attempts to import the humanoid recipe of large-scale motion data have inherited one tacit assumption: that robot motion must first pass through an animal body, making data collection dependent on cooperative animals, reconstruction fragile across species, and retargeting ill-posed across incompatible morphologies. We propose Uni-Mo, a fully automated pipeline that removes the animal from the loop by reframing data scarcity as a generation problem: an LLM proposes motion prompts, a video diffusion model synthesizes the corresponding robot behaviors, and the generated videos are lifted into 3D reference trajectories used to train tracking policies deployed on a real Unitree Go2. To make naively-drifting generations reliably extractable, we introduce an Identity Consistency Loss that enforces appearance coherence across frames. We release Quad-Imaginarium at this https URL, the resulting open-source dataset of 7,488 language-annotated quadruped motions (18.5 hours) spanning acrobatic and performative behaviors. We validate 392 randomly sampled motions on a real Unitree Go2 with a 96.7% deployment success rate, complemented by a 97.6% success rate across the full dataset in simulation.

Causal representation learning for time series has developed strong identifiability results in discrete-time latent causal models, but identifiability in continuous-time latent stochastic differential equation (SDE) models remains largely open. We address this gap using environment-induced shifts in diffusion covariance. We study additive-noise latent SDEs observed through an unknown nonlinear diffeomorphism, with shared drift but environment-specific diffusion covariance. We show that two diagonal diffusion regimes with pairwise distinct coordinate-wise variance ratios identify the latent coordinates up to permutation and scaling, without any sparsity assumption on the drift. We first prove this result for linear Ornstein--Uhlenbeck systems and then extend it to general additive-noise latent SDEs. Under mild smoothness, the instantaneous drift-Jacobian causal graph is identifiable up to the same permutation. We propose a two-stage estimator for latent disentanglement and optional graph recovery; experiments on synthetic systems confirm the predicted identifiability boundary, and an application to Hardanger Bridge monitoring data illustrates the approach on real sensor trajectories.

Flow Matching (FM) has achieved remarkable generative performance, yet it suffers from exposure bias due to discrepancies between training and inference. Existing mitigation strategies typically rely on static constraints or external heuristics. In this work, we propose that exposure bias itself inherently contains dynamic signals that can guide its own rectification. To leverage this, we introduce DEFAR (DirEctional-Frequency Adaptive Rectification). This framework simulates the single-step inference process during training to identify exposure bias. It utilizes directional and frequency-adaptive feedback signals from the bias itself to enhance the model's bias tolerance. It consists of two key components: (1) Anti-Drift Rectification (ADR). ADR treats inference-time drift as a signal to learn the direction to steer deviated states back toward the target. ADR endows the model with intrinsic active self-rectification capabilities; (2) Frequency Compensation (FC). Empirically, we observe that accumulated bias often stems from a lack of low-frequency components in high-noise stages, and exposure bias carries the missing frequency. FC leverages the bias itself as a self-feedback weighting factor to reinforce the missing frequency components. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CelebA-64, and ImageNet-256/512 show that DEFAR outperforms prior baselines and further demonstrates favorable scalability, compatibility, and inference robustness.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for solving nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs), including battery electrochemical models. They typically en-force conservation laws within the loss function to ensure physically consistent solutions. Tradi-tional numerical methods such as finite difference, finite volume, and finite element techniques, re-ly on discretization and can be computationally expensive for nonlinear systems. To address this challenge, PINNs offer improved scalability, particularly for reduced-order models like the single particle model with electrolyte (SPMe). The SPMe describes lithium-ion battery dynamics through coupled diffusion, transport, reaction kinetics, and voltage equations. Despite these advantages, training SPMe-based PINNs from scratch for different battery chemistries or operating conditions is demanding and often leads to slow convergence. To overcome this limitation, this work introduces a transfer learning framework for SPMe-PINNs. The model is first pretrained to learn general elec-trochemical dynamics and then adapted to a target battery by transferring weights, freezing se-lected layers, and fine tuning the remaining parameters, including estimating key electrochemical variables. Validation using PyBaMM demonstrates accurate voltage prediction, indicating that the proposed approach preserves electrochemical consistency while reducing training time and ena-bling efficient generalization across batteries.

We propose a framework for reward allocation in fully delegated AI cooperatives where humans are represented by agents that contribute data and participate in model updates under heterogeneous value constraints. The key idea is to credit only those updates that remain admissible after screening them against each principal's value profile. We formulate value-conditioned gradient filtering, online marginal contribution signals, and cumulative revenue settlement within a traversal learning (TL) substrate. TL is especially attractive here because it performs decentralized backpropagation without the quality loss associated with aggregation-centric distributed learning and, we argue, offers a finer attribution substrate than FedAvg-style federated learning by preserving explicit traversal and gradient paths. The framework is positioned against data valuation, federated contribution estimation, personalized federated learning, and pluralistic alignment.

Extracting dynamic 4D object interactions from massive, in-the-wild monocular videos offers a highly efficient data collection pathway for scaling Embodied AI and training VLAs. However, existing monocular 4D reconstruction methods primarily focus on isolated objects, often failing under the severe occlusions and complex dynamics inherent in multi-object interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose HAT-4D, the first agentic framework designed to reconstruct the 3D geometry, temporal dynamics, and physical interactions of multiple objects from a single video. By integrating VLMs with a multi-level human-in-the-loop feedback mechanism, HAT-4D efficiently resolves depth ambiguities and interaction-induced occlusions during 3D generation and 4D propagation, yielding physically plausible assets without relying on expensive multicamera rigs. As a scalable data engine, HAT-4D facilitates the creation of MVOIK-4D, an open-world benchmark for monocular 4D interaction reconstruction, accompanied by a novel multi-dimensional evaluation protocol focused on physical plausibility and temporal consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HAT-4D achieves SOTA performance on most evaluation metrics, while maintaining competitive semantic alignment. Ablation studies show that introducing a small amount of human feedback improves interaction reconstruction. Moreover, the data produced by HAT-4D effectively improves baseline performance when used for fine-tuning. Our data and code are available at this https URL

While interpretable models such as concept bottleneck models (CBMs) and program synthesis methods enable verification of model decisions, their evaluation is typically limited to simple tasks, leaving complex reasoning on real-world images largely unexplored. We introduce COCOLogic-V2, an object-centric dataset for visual inductive reasoning on real-world images covering a broad subset of first-order logic. By categorizing samples into positive variants, near-boundary (NB), and far-from-boundary (FB) negatives, COCOLogic-V2 enables fine-grained diagnosis of model accountability. Our evaluations show that models tend to separate positive and FB samples well but fail on NB samples, while perceptual noise and large rule-induced search spaces pose additional challenges in few-shot settings. Together, these results highlight that visual inductive reasoning remains an open challenge and COCOLogic-V2 provides a concrete foundation for advancing methods in this direction.

Bimanual manipulation is essential for advanced robotic systems because it offers higher efficiency and flexibility compared to single-arm configurations. However, existing approaches either lack inter-arm interaction or ignore the need for a dynamic division of labor, treating the arms as functionally equivalent. To address these limitations, this paper draws inspiration from human bimanual manipulation where one arm handles core operations and the other provides auxiliary support, and proposes PA-BiCoop, a new single-model bimanual cooperation framework with dynamic primary-auxiliary arm differentiation. PA-BiCoop categorizes robotic arms into primary and auxiliary arms with adaptively adjustable roles across task stages, employs two specialized decoders that share a global feature encoder: the primary decoder generates the primary arm's base-coordinate pose and core-task affordance heatmaps, and the auxiliary decoder outputs the auxiliary arm's relative pose in the primary arm's coordinate system. Moreover, we design a dynamic role assignment module to automatically map roles to left/right arms without manual pre-definition. This design facilitates inter-arm knowledge sharing and coordinated manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PA-BiCoop achieves superior performance: it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 48% on average in RLBench2 simulation tasks and by over 50% on average in real world tasks, thereby verifying its effectiveness and advancement in bimanual manipulation.

Identifying robust associations between cardiac imaging phenotypes and clinical diseases is fundamental to population-scale cardiovascular research and reliable risk stratification. However, current phenome-wide association studies rely on pre-defined, single-variable phenotypes or expert-crafted features, which limits their ability to capture clinically meaningful non-linear effects and cross-phenotype interactions. To address this, we propose CPAgents, an iterative phenotype-Composition framework for cardiovascular Phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) that automatically constructs and validates interpretable composite phenotypes (e.g., polynomial, ratio, and interaction forms) from base imaging features. Specifically, our system coordinates three agents: (i) an Analyst that identifies statistical pathologies and nominates candidate transformations; (ii) a Proposer that generates constrained, medically and statistically motivated expressions under numerical safety rules; and (iii) a Verifier that evaluates candidates using multi-stage criteria and produces transparent evidence trails for accepted phenotypes. Evaluated on a population-scale cardiac imaging cohort, the discovered composite phenotypes markedly improve disease discrimination: across 72 classifier-disease-metric combinations, our variants achieve the top rank in 56 cases versus 18 for baselines, with gains observed across all nine clinical disease categories. Our framework yields compact, clinically interpretable phenotype formulas with transparent evidence trails, enabling scalable discovery of stronger phenotype-disease associations beyond expert-driven feature selection.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved the reasoning capability of large language models, reaching expert or even superhuman performance in domains such as competition math. However, whether weaker agents and humans can actually harness this capability is far less certain, with RLVR documented to drift reasoning toward idiosyncratic patterns such as poor readability and language mixing. Tandem training is a recently introduced paradigm that targets this compatibility problem: a trained, stronger senior co-generates each rollout with a frozen, weaker junior, and the two are rewarded as a team, so the senior is pushed to reason in ways the junior can follow. Yet this paradigm has so far been demonstrated only in proof-of-concept settings, leaving open whether it scales to the long chains of thought of the modern RLVR pipeline. In this work, we propose Tandem Reinforcement Learning (TRL), which carries the tandem training paradigm into RLVR. In TRL, the senior and a frozen junior alternate stochastically to co-generate the reasoning, the resulting generation is rewarded, and the standard GRPO loss is applied to the senior. Training Qwen3-4B-Instruct on competition math, we find that TRL matches vanilla GRPO on solo reasoning capability while three properties emerge together from the same rollout structure: stronger handoff robustness with the junior, reduced distributional drift from the junior, and a chain-of-thought more legible to the junior. Our results demonstrate a promising route for RLVR with practical payoffs in multi-model communication and human compatibility.

Echocardiography is the most widely used non-invasive cardiac imaging modality, providing essential information for cardiovascular diagnosis. Interpreting an echocardiogram requires synthesizing complementary evidence across multiple heart views to identify abnormalities and produce structured clinical reports. While recent efforts focus on improving classification performance, most models lack explicit diagnostic reasoning and spatially grounded anatomical evidence, limiting clinician trust. We present EchoSonar-R, a multi-view reasoning-enabled vision-language model that jointly performs multi-label disease classification and report generation from echocardiography studies. EchoSonar-R combines a spatiotemporal video encoder with a structure-aware cardiac detector that provides spatially grounded anatomical cues to improve interpretability and clinician trust during cross-view reasoning. EchoSonar-R is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on reasoning-annotated targets, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with task-specific rewards that jointly align classification and report generation within a unified reinforcement-learning framework. Across a private multi-view dataset and two public benchmarks, EchoSonar-R improves macro balanced accuracy by 17.1% on the private set and 6.1% on MIMICEchoQA over the strongest baseline, achieves a GREEN clinical faithfulness score of 0.800, and produces interpretable reasoning traces grounded in multi-view visual evidence.

We propose KL-Coupled Policy Regularization (KCPR), a policy coordination framework for Reward-Punishment Reinforcement Learning (RPRL). Based on KCPR, we derive KL-Coupled Soft Optimality (KCSO) and develop its deep realization, klDMP. Unlike existing RPRL approaches that optimize reward-seeking and punishment-related policies largely independently, KCPR enables direct interactions between companion policies by treating each as a dynamically learned prior for the other. KCSO yields coupled soft-optimal policies and KL-regularized Bellman operators, allowing reward and punishment information to jointly influence value propagation. To improve learning stability, we introduce a companion-prior softening mechanism and evaluate separate replay-buffer designs for balancing reward- and punishment-related experience. Experiments in grid-world and Gazebo robotic navigation tasks demonstrate that klDMP improves safety and learning stability while maintaining competitive task performance compared with DQN, SQL and softDMP. These results suggest that policy-level coordination provides an effective mechanism for integrating multiple behavioral objectives and may serve as a useful design principle for reinforcement learning systems with interacting motivational processes.

In-context segmentation (ICS) requires a model to segment target regions in a query image using only a few reference images and their corresponding masks, without updating any parameters. Despite recent progress, prior ICS studies have largely overlooked a critical aspect: system robustness, ie, whether the model can produce stable segmentation results for the same query under different references. In this work, we revisit ICS from the robustness perspective and introduce a novel paradigm, Concept-Guided In-Context Segmentation (CG-ICS), which performs segmentation by extracting high-level semantic concepts from references rather than relying solely on low-level visual matching. Specifically, CG-ICS introduces a concept reasoning module that uses an MLLM to propose candidates and a SAM3-driven scoring function with tree-search refinement to select reliable textual concepts, together with a parallel visual exemplar route that provides query-side spatial grounding via a simple context construction. Both the textual concept and the visual exemplar are then used to activate the segmentation capability of a frozen SAM3 backbone. Extensive experiments on standard ICS benchmarks demonstrate that CG-ICS not only achieves state-of-the-art accuracy but also substantially improves robustness, yielding a more reliable ICS system with significantly reduced variance across diverse reference choices.

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods commonly update the affine parameters of normalization layers to adapt deployed models under distribution shifts. However, per-channel affine parameters perform axis-aligned scaling and shifting, making them geometrically incapable of correcting cross-channel structural changes induced by distribution shift. To address this limitation, we propose MixTTA, a lightweight plug-in module that equips normalization layers with a low-rank cross-channel transformation, enabling inter-channel mixing at each layer. To ensure that the low-rank branch captures only cross-channel interactions, we also propose Decoupling Projection that enforces strict separation from the diagonal affine path, along with Spectral Projection that prevents rank-1 collapse under non-stationary test streams. MixTTA can be seamlessly integrated into any existing normalization-based TTA method. Experiments in both standard and wild TTA settings show consistent improvements over strong baselines while mitigating adaptation failure under challenging conditions. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.

Graph-based fraud detection is essential for safeguarding large-scale transaction systems, where undetected anomalies may lead to substantial financial losses and security risks. Real-world fraud graphs pose two coupled challenges: sparse and imbalanced supervision, where verified fraudulent labels are scarce and heavily skewed toward benign accounts, and representation dilution, where spatial message passing may oversmooth camouflaged anomalies while spectral filters may suppress fraud-relevant mid- and high-frequency irregularities. To address these challenges, we propose ADC-GNN, short for Attention-guided Diffusion-Contrastive Graph Neural Network, a unified framework that combines diffusion-guided feature augmentation, contrastive representation learning, and multi-hop spectral attention for few-shot graph fraud detection. The diffusion component is formulated as a feature-space denoising augmentation mechanism rather than a full topology-generative graph diffusion model: it constructs noise-perturbed node-feature views under a cosine schedule and uses contrastive learning to stabilize node representations across perturbations. The spectral attention module further adaptively emphasizes fraud-relevant hop-level and relation-level cues. We evaluate ADC-GNN primarily on three public benchmarks and additionally report a proprietary real-world telecom transaction dataset with approximately 60,000 records as a private case study. Under the 1% training setting, ADC-GNN achieves consistent improvements over original graph fraud baselines and four protocol-consistent recent graph anomaly/fraud baselines on the public benchmarks. Additional analyses on split stability, training ratios, oversampling alternatives, module-level ablations, diffusion schedules, and runtime and memory-consumption comparisons further characterize the effective operating regime of ADC-GNN.

We study whether we can learn novel manipulation skills from human actions to a bi-manual robot with parallel grippers. Human action data is cheap, abundant, and diverse, making it one of the most promising resources for scaling up robot learning. Yet transferring skills from humans to robots remains hard: most prior work treats humans as just another bi-manual 6DoF embodiment, where hand-pose estimates are noisy and the contact patterns of human fingers differ fundamentally from those of a parallel gripper. We argue that learning rotation-inclusive action signals from human data is therefore sub-optimal, and instead propose a bridging action representation: the relative wrist translation within the initial head-camera frame, an action space shared by humans and robots. To handle the potential absence of certain action components in different embodiments, we build a $\pi_0$-like vision-language-action model with interleaved action tokens and attention masking. On a suite of novel bi-manual manipulation tasks, our bridging action transfers human manipulation knowledge to robots far more effectively than noisy 6DoF human actions and scales with the amount of human data.

Video generation models have emerged as a promising paradigm for embodied world simulation. However, both general-domain video generators and robot-specific data fine-tuned models can still produce physically implausible manipulations, including discontinuous motion trajectories and inconsistent robot-object interactions, which limits their reliability as world simulators. Through extensive experiments, we find that such physical instability mainly arises from two factors: deformation of moving objects and implausible spatio-temporal correlations among interacting entities, particularly during contact. Building on this observation, we propose PhysisForcing, a scalable training framework that strengthens physical consistency by focusing supervision on physics-informative regions through joint optimization of pixel-level and semantic-level features. The framework consists of a pixel-level trajectory alignment loss, which supervises DiT features using reference point trajectories, and a semantic-level relational alignment loss, which aligns DiT features with inter-region relations extracted from a frozen video understanding encoder. Extensive experiments on R-Bench, PAI-Bench, and EZS-Bench show that PhysisForcing consistently improves embodied video generation over strong baselines, improving the Wan2.2-I2V-A14B and Cosmos3-Nano base models on R-Bench by 22.3\% and 9.2\% (7.1\% and 3.7\% over vanilla finetuning), with the Cosmos3-Nano variant attaining the best overall score. Beyond generation, as a world model under the WorldArena action-planner protocol it raises the closed-loop success rate from 16.0\% to 24.0\% and further improves downstream policy success, indicating that physically aligned video models yield stronger representations for robotic manipulation.

This article addresses the combinatorial complexity inherent in modern high-tech system design by presenting automation-in-design (AiD) as a transformative paradigm. We propose computational design synthesis (CDS), a framework utilising deep learning and generative AI to automate the creation of novel systems. Two case studies (e-drive system design and spatial dimensioning problem) serve as proof-points for this approach. The AI-driven methods used in the case studies represent a fundamental shift in engineering, advancing from simulation-based optimisation towards autonomous design with minimal human supervision.

Frontier large language model training consumes massive accelerator fleets and long wall-clock computation, making stability failures costly when they occur. After a numerical or a hyperparameter fault has already destabilized the training dynamics, it may continue for thousands of steps while loss and gradient norms still appear normal. We study mechanism-driven detection of training instability by deriving internal monitors from the functional role of each critical module and from the earliest computational sites where failures are expected to produce measurable signatures. For low-precision flash attention, we monitor the spectral entropy of a QK bilinear decomposition, whose first-order term becomes abnormal before the loss fully collapses. For MoE routers, we derive indicators from their role in expert selection. Our fault-injection experiments on low-precision attention, large learning-rate, and combined faults show that these signals provide distinct signatures for different failures, triggering thousands of steps before loss divergence.

Degradation-aware prompts, conditions, and latent priors are increasingly used in image restoration, yet they are usually judged by a single endpoint: whether the restored image obtains higher PSNR. This is a weak test of semantics. A condition can help by adding capacity, acting as a global correction bias, or exploiting dataset shortcuts, without becoming an interpretable degradation prior. We propose BiDeMem, a bidirectional degradation memory for explainable image restoration. A query built from restoration features and input statistics retrieves a compact top-k subset of memory slots. The same selected slot identity supports the restoration path at inference time and a training-only forward-degradation explanation path. The study centers on verifiability in a controlled multi-degradation NAFNet setting. New controls separate the gain from a correction head alone, a dense query prior, and a static global prior: these variants are 0.2588, 0.2586, and 0.2839 dB below BiRank, respectively. Strong residual supervision and a wider degradation head also remain below the full bidirectional memory model. Intervention probes show that BiRank preserves restoration quality while increasing wrong-prior and native-prior sensitivity, framing degradation memory as both a restoration module and a falsifiable explanation mechanism.

Vision-based assessment can provide convenient and cost-effective evaluation in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) rehabilitation training, where action quality assessment (AQA) from computer vision offers a promising solution. Existing automatic AQA frameworks for physical therapy typically rely on skeletal data captured from a single viewpoint, which is inefficient for TCM techniques such as acupuncture or Tuina that involve dense hand self-occlusion and complex hand-object interactions. To address these challenges, we propose CME-AQA, a cross-view, multimodal vision-based assessment framework that integrates visual-pose fusion to enhance understanding of environmental context and leverages both first-person and third-person videos during training to improve inference robustness. We collected two dual-view datasets, TCM-AQA61-A (Acupuncture) and TCM-AQA61-T (Tuina), each containing synchronized first-person and third-person recordings of 61 subjects with expert annotations. Experimental results show that our approach achieves superior or comparable mean performance against competitive baselines, achieving over 10% relative improvement in weighted F1 over the best competing method on key rating tasks such as Needle Depth and Quick Needle Insertion, while also reducing mean absolute error in quantitative measures such as insertion time and manipulation frequency. Testing on a CPR dataset further demonstrates comparable performance on several posture-based criteria, suggesting applicability to related structured simulated clinical skill assessments where participant motion is central to evaluation. Overall, CME-AQA enhances assessment accuracy for structured TCM rehabilitation training and facilitates more convenient and effective training-oriented skill evaluation.

Real-world object removal is challenging due to two key difficulties: the target object's non-local effects, such as shadows and reflections, which are difficult to model, and the fact that user-provided masks are often inaccurate or incomplete. With billions of parameters and tens of denoising steps, diffusion-based models achieve strong removal performance at the expense of substantial computational cost, limiting their use in interactive applications and on edge devices. To address these challenges, we present OSOR (One-Step Object Removal), which simultaneously achieves efficient, effect-aware, and mask-robust object removal. Concretely, OSOR introduces: (1) an occupancy-guided discriminator for precise boundary supervision, enabling stable single-step diffusion training; (2) an alpha head that leverages knowledge from pretrained diffusion models to predict appropriate removal regions with minimal overhead, thereby handling imperfect masks; and (3) a semantic-anchored verification pipeline (SAVP) that filters noisy instruction-based triplets to produce effect-aware supervision at scale. Using SAVP, we curate CORNE, which contains 280K verified removal pairs, and further annotate AnimeEraseBench and TextEraseBench to evaluate performance on more complex removal tasks. Experiments show that OSOR surpasses strong multi-step diffusion baselines in perceptual quality while achieving $4\times$ to $30\times$ faster inference.

Video-based remote physiological measurement (RPM) is highly accessible but remains fragile under varying illumination, skin tones, and motion. Radio frequency (RF) radar is largely invariant to illumination and appearance, providing complementary cardio-respiratory micro-motion cues; however, requiring radar at inference is often impractical due to its limited ubiquity and deployment overhead. We propose RPM-Distill, a physiology-guided cross-modal distillation framework that leverages synchronized radar only during training while retaining video-only inference. Our key observation is that although RGB and RF waveforms differ in sensing physics and time-domain morphology, they share similar latent periodic rhythm in the frequency domain. We thus distill physiology-structured spectral evidence to improve robustness, via losses that (i) anchor the fundamental peak, (ii) match the off-peak background distribution, and (iii) preserve spectral morphology and sharpness. To avoid negative transfer under sample-level teacher quality and alignment uncertainty, a spectral policy network predicts sample-level distillation gates and component weights from the student--teacher spectral relation map, learned with a meta bilevel objective on a small labeled validation split. Through extensive experiments in challenging conditions and cross-dataset settings, RPM-Distill brings 81\% MAE and 21\% correlation improvement over unimodal baselines. Code is at this https URL.

Micro-expression recognition is challenging due to subtle and short-lived facial muscle movements. Existing methods rely heavily on apex-onset frames, overlook fine-grained inter-frame dynamics, and separately model spatial and temporal information, limiting generalization across datasets. To address these challenges, we propose STAG, a dynamic ROI-AU-coupled spatial-temporal network that jointly models motion flow and adaptive facial connectivity. The framework extracts optical flow from discriminative frames using magnitude-based selection and temporal attention. A dual-branch architecture combines an enhanced graph attention network for structured spatial reasoning with a transformer encoder for temporal modeling. A bidirectional cross-attention module enables mutual refinement of spatial and temporal features, while AU-guided dynamic connectivity adapts facial region interactions according to muscle activation patterns. The transformer captures subtle temporal dynamics beyond apex-based approaches, improving semantic consistency and interpretability for explainable micro-expression recognition. The fused representation is optimized using focal loss and evaluated on CASME II, 4DME, DFME, NaME, SAMM, and SMIC-HS. Extensive experiments demonstrate improved robustness, generalization, interpretability, and computational efficiency, confirming the effectiveness of adaptive relational reasoning, AU-guided dynamic connectivity, and deep spatial-temporal feature fusion for accurate cross-dataset micro-expression recognition.

In real-world deployments, scene text detectors inevitably face distribution shifts beyond the training distribution. Prior work often depends on large-scale scene-text pretraining, yet evaluation under cross-domain changes and real-world imaging degradations remains limited. We propose TextDS, an efficient framework for scene text detection under distribution shifts. First, we propose a data-efficient dual-encoder design with visual foundation models, eliminating the reliance on large-scale scene-text pretraining. Second, we introduce Step-wise LoRA adaptation (SWLoRA), which performs progressive low-rank refinement with a dynamic early-exit mechanism for effective feature adaptation. Third, we propose Common Subspace Fusion (CSF) to align and fuse the two branches in a shared subspace while retaining complementary, shift-robust information. Finally, we construct adverse-condition scene text detection datasets to address the gap in evaluating under imaging degradation. Experiments show that TextDS achieves competitive performance in scene text detection, demonstrating robustness across domains and adverse imaging conditions with only 4.9M trainable parameters.

Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural-language questions by reasoning over structured facts. Existing multi-hop KGQA methods mainly rely on topic-centered expansion, which faces two key challenges: the search space rapidly grows with noisy mixed-type paths, and retrieved paths may fail to satisfy the semantic constraints of complex questions. To address these challenges, we propose OPI, an ontology-guided evidence path inference framework for multi-hop KGQA. OPI introduces a relation-centric ontology graph to capture the head-tail type constraints of relations, providing a compact interface for answer-side constraints. Based on this ontology graph, OPI first introduces a bidirectional retrieval mechanism by mapping the predicted answer type to compatible final-hop relations and combining topic-side prefix expansion with answer-side final-hop matching, thereby suppressing noisy mixed-type expansion. OPI further adopts an iterative refinement strategy to reassess retrieved paths and candidate answers under the question context, filtering type-compatible but question-irrelevant evidence for more reliable answer prediction. Experiments on WebQSP, CWQ, and MetaQA show that OPI substantially reduces the search space, improves Hit@1/F1 by 4.6/5.0 points on WebQSP and 8.9/3.3 points on CWQ over the strongest prior results, and achieves near-saturated Hit@1 on MetaQA with the retrieval module alone.