Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models often fail to generalize to unseen camera viewpoints, a limitation stemming from their difficulty in inferring robust 3D geometry from 2D images. We introduce GeoAware-VLA, a simple yet effective approach that enhances viewpoint invariance by integrating strong geometric priors into the vision backbone. Instead of training a visual encoder or relying on explicit 3D data, we leverage a frozen, pretrained geometric vision model as a feature extractor. A lightweight, trainable projection layer then adapts these geometrically-rich features for the policy decoder, relieving it of the burden of learning 3D consistency from scratch. Through extensive evaluations on the LIBERO and CALVIN benchmarks, we show that GeoAware-VLA preserves and even improves in-distribution performance while achieving substantial gains in zero-shot generalization to unseen camera poses, improving unseen-view success rates by an average of 35 percentage points on LIBERO and over 11 percentage points on CALVIN compared to their respective baselines. Crucially, these gains transfer to the physical world, where our model shows significant improvement on a real robotic platform. Our approach proves effective across both continuous and discrete action spaces, highlighting that robust geometric grounding is a key ingredient for building more generalizable robotic agents.

Evaluating object detection models in deployment is challenging because ground-truth annotations are rarely available. We introduce the Cumulative Consensus Score (CCS), a label-free monitoring signal for continuous evaluation and comparison of detectors in real-world settings. CCS applies test-time data augmentation to each image and measures the spatial consistency of predicted bounding boxes across augmented views using Intersection over Union. The resulting consensus score serves as a proxy for reliability without requiring bounding box annotations. In controlled experiments on Open Images and KITTI, CCS achieved over 90% congruence with F1-score, Probabilistic Detection Quality, and Optimal Correction Cost, with qualitative consistency further confirmed on COCO and BDD100K across model pairs. The method is model-agnostic, working across single-stage and two-stage detectors, and operates at the case level to highlight under-performing scenarios. We also provide a simplified theoretical link between expected CCS and detection correctness. Altogether, CCS provides a robust foundation for DevOps-style monitoring of object detectors.

Road traffic accidents remain a significant global concern, with human error, particularly distracted and impaired driving, among the leading causes. This study introduces a novel driver behaviour classification system that uses external observation techniques to detect indicators of distraction and impairment. The proposed framework employs advanced computer vision methodologies, including real-time object tracking, lateral displacement analysis, and lane position monitoring. The system identifies unsafe driving behaviours such as excessive lateral movement and erratic trajectory patterns by implementing the YOLO object detection model and custom lane estimation algorithms. Unlike systems reliant on inter-vehicular communication, this vision-based approach enables behavioural analysis of non-connected vehicles. Experimental evaluations on diverse video datasets demonstrate the framework's reliability and adaptability across varying road and environmental conditions.

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) image segmentation is crucial in diagnosing and treating many diseases, such as brain tumors. Existing MRI image segmentation methods mainly fall into a centralized multimodal paradigm, which is inapplicable in engineering non-centralized mix-modal medical scenarios. In this situation, each distributed client (hospital) processes multiple mixed MRI modalities, and the modality set and image data for each client are diverse, suffering from extensive client-wise modality heterogeneity and data heterogeneity. In this paper, we first formulate non-centralized mix-modal MRI image segmentation as a new paradigm for federated learning (FL) that involves multiple modalities, called mix-modal federated learning (MixMFL). It distinguishes from existing multimodal federating learning (MulMFL) and cross-modal federating learning (CroMFL) paradigms. Then, we proposed a novel modality decoupling and memorizing mix-modal federated learning framework (MDM-MixMFL) for MRI image segmentation, which is characterized by a modality decoupling strategy and a modality memorizing mechanism. Specifically, the modality decoupling strategy disentangles each modality into modality-tailored and modality-shared information. During mix-modal federated updating, corresponding modality encoders undergo tailored and shared updating, respectively. It facilitates stable and adaptive federating aggregation of heterogeneous data and modalities from distributed clients. Besides, the modality memorizing mechanism stores client-shared modality prototypes dynamically refreshed from every modality-tailored encoder to compensate for incomplete modalities in each local client.

3D object detection from point clouds plays a critical role in autonomous driving. Currently, the primary methods for point cloud processing are voxel-based and pillar-based approaches. Voxel-based methods offer high accuracy through fine-grained spatial segmentation but suffer from slower inference speeds. Pillar-based methods enhance inference speed but typically lag behind voxel-based methods in detection accuracy. To address this trade-off, we propose a novel point cloud processing method, PointSlice, which slices point clouds along the horizontal plane and incorporates a dedicated detection network. The main contributions of PointSlice are: (1) A novel slice-based representation that converts 3D point clouds into multiple sets of 2D (x-y) data slices. The model explicitly learns 2D data distributions by treating the 3D point cloud as separate batches of 2D data, which significantly reduces the parameter count and enhances inference speed; (2) The introduction of a Slice Interaction Network (SIN). To preserve vertical geometric relationships across slices, we incorporate SIN into the 2D backbone network, thereby improving the model's 3D perception capability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointSlice achieves a superior balance between detection accuracy and efficiency. On the Waymo Open Dataset, PointSlice achieves a 1.13$\times$ speedup and uses 0.79$\times$ the parameters of the state-of-the-art voxel-based method (SAFDNet), with a marginal 1.2 mAPH accuracy reduction. On the nuScenes dataset, we achieve a state-of-the-art 66.7 mAP. On the Argoverse 2 dataset, PointSlice is 1.10$\times$ faster with 0.66$\times$ the parameters, while showing a negligible accuracy drop of 1.0 mAP. The source code is available at https://github.com/qifeng22/PointSlice2.

The nanostructure inverse problem is an attractive problem that helps researchers to understand the relationship between the properties and the structure of nanomaterials. This study focuses on the problem of recovering the model system of monometallic nanoparticles (MMNPs) from their pair distribution function (PDF) and regards it as a highly ill-posed conditional generation task. This study proposes a Condition-based Latent Diffusion Model (CbLDM) as a feasible solution to this problem. This model demonstrates an acceleration approach within the framework of a latent diffusion model by using conditional priors to estimate the conditional posterior distribution, which is an approximate distribution of p(z|x). In addition, this study uses Laplacian matrix instead of distance matrix to recover the nanostructure, which helps to improve stability. Our study demonstrates that a latent diffusion model with a conditional prior can generate nanostructures that are consistent with PDF observations and physically meaningful, thereby laying the groundwork for subsequent more complex inverse problems.

Time series forecasting underpins applications in finance, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. Despite the success of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs), existing approaches operate in a unimodal setting and rely on static prompts or fixed fusion schemes, limiting their ability to exploit multimodal context and adapt to instance-level variation. We propose UniCast, a parameter-efficient multimodal framework that extends TSFMs through instance conditioned prompting and dynamic modality routing. UniCast infers a conditional prompt from time series, vision, and text inputs via a Transformer-based contextual distiller, enabling input-specific adaptation without updating the forecasting backbone. To regulate how auxiliary modalities influence predictions, UniCast employs Modality Routing, a cross-attention mechanism that estimates modality relevance given the current temporal state and selectively amplifies informative signals while suppressing noise. Integrated with a frozen TSFM via soft prompt tuning, UniCast preserves foundation-level generalization while enabling effective multimodal control. Extensive experiments across diverse forecasting benchmarks show that UniCast consistently outperforms all existing TSFM baselines, demonstrating that instance-conditioned multimodal control is critical for next-generation time series forecasting.

Despite the impressive progress on understanding and generating images shown by the recent unified architectures, the integration of 3D tasks remains challenging and largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce UniUGG, the first unified understanding and generation framework for 3D modalities. Our unified framework employs an LLM to comprehend and decode sentences and 3D representations. At its core, we propose a spatial decoder leveraging a latent diffusion model to generate high-quality 3D representations. This allows for the generation and imagination of 3D scenes based on a reference image and an arbitrary view transformation, while remaining supports for spatial visual question answering (VQA) tasks. Additionally, we propose a geometric-semantic learning strategy to pretrain the vision encoder. This design jointly captures the input's semantic and geometric cues, enhancing both spatial understanding and generation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method in visual representation, spatial understanding, and 3D generation.

Most prior unsupervised domain adaptation approaches for medical image segmentation are narrowly tailored to either the source-accessible setting, where adaptation is guided by source-target alignment, or the source-free setting, which typically resorts to implicit adaptation mechanisms such as pseudo-labeling and network distillation. This substantial divergence in methodological designs between the two settings reveals an inherent flaw: the lack of an explicit, structured construction of anatomical knowledge that naturally generalizes across domains and settings. To bridge this longstanding divide, we introduce a unified, semantically grounded framework that supports both source-accessible and source-free adaptation. Fundamentally distinct from all prior works, our framework's adaptability emerges naturally as a direct consequence of the model architecture, without relying on explicit cross-domain alignment strategies. Specifically, our model learns a domain-agnostic probabilistic manifold as a global space of anatomical regularities, mirroring how humans establish visual understanding. Thus, the structural content in each image can be interpreted as a canonical anatomy retrieved from the manifold and a spatial transformation capturing individual-specific geometry. This disentangled, interpretable formulation enables semantically meaningful prediction with intrinsic adaptability. Extensive experiments on challenging cardiac and abdominal datasets show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art results in both settings, with source-free performance closely approaching its source-accessible counterpart, a level of consistency rarely observed in prior works. The results provide a principled foundation for anatomically informed, interpretable, and unified solutions for domain adaptation in medical imaging. The code is available at https://github.com/wxdrizzle/remind

Large language models have achieved substantial progress in mathematical reasoning, yet their advancement is limited by the scarcity of high-quality, high-difficulty training data. Existing synthesis methods largely rely on transforming human-written templates, limiting both diversity and scalability. We propose MathSmith, a novel framework for synthesizing challenging mathematical problems to enhance LLM reasoning. Rather than modifying existing problems, MathSmith constructs new ones from scratch by randomly sampling concept-explanation pairs from PlanetMath, ensuring data independence and avoiding contamination. To increase difficulty, we design nine predefined strategies as soft constraints during rationales. We further adopts reinforcement learning to jointly optimize structural validity, reasoning complexity, and answer consistency. The length of the reasoning trace generated under autoregressive prompting is used to reflect cognitive complexity, encouraging the creation of more demanding problems aligned with long-chain-of-thought reasoning. Experiments across five benchmarks, categorized as easy & medium (GSM8K, MATH-500) and hard (AIME2024, AIME2025, OlympiadBench), show that MathSmith consistently outperforms existing baselines under both short and long CoT settings. Additionally, a weakness-focused variant generation module enables targeted improvement on specific concepts. Overall, MathSmith exhibits strong scalability, generalization, and transferability, highlighting the promise of high-difficulty synthetic data in advancing LLM reasoning capabilities. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Jasaxion/MathSmith.

Spectral information has long been recognized as a critical cue in remote sensing observations. Although numerous vision-language models have been developed for pixel-level interpretation, spectral information remains underutilized, resulting in suboptimal performance, particularly in multispectral scenarios. To address this limitation, we construct a vision-language instruction-following dataset named SPIE, which encodes spectral priors of land-cover objects into textual attributes recognizable by large language models (LLMs), based on classical spectral index computations. Leveraging this dataset, we propose SPEX, a multimodal LLM designed for instruction-driven land cover extraction. To this end, we introduce several carefully designed components and training strategies, including multiscale feature aggregation, token context condensation, and multispectral visual pre-training, to achieve precise and flexible pixel-level interpretation. To the best of our knowledge, SPEX is the first multimodal vision-language model dedicated to land cover extraction in spectral remote sensing imagery. Extensive experiments on five public multispectral datasets demonstrate that SPEX consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in extracting typical land cover categories such as vegetation, buildings, and water bodies. Moreover, SPEX is capable of generating textual explanations for its predictions, thereby enhancing interpretability and user-friendliness. Code will be released at: https://github.com/MiliLab/SPEX.

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their strong zero-shot capabilities and widespread real-world applications. Such models typically require a computationally costly pre-training on large-scale, carefully curated collections of real-world sequences. To allow for a sample-efficient pre-training of TSFMs, we propose \textsc{CauKer}, a novel algorithm designed to generate diverse, causally coherent synthetic time series with realistic trends, seasonality, and nonlinear interactions. \textsc{CauKer} combines Gaussian Process (GP) kernel composition with Structural Causal Models (SCM) to produce data for sample-efficient pre-training of state-of-the-art classification TSFMs having different architectures and following different pre-training approaches. Additionally, our experiments reveal that \textsc{CauKer}-generated datasets exhibit clear scaling laws for both dataset size (10K to 10M samples) and model capacity (1M to 783M parameters), unlike real-world datasets, which display irregular scaling behavior. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ShifengXIE/CauKer.

Meaningful speech assessment is vital in clinical phonetics and therapy monitoring. This study examined the link between perceptual speech assessments and objective acoustic measures in a large head and neck cancer (HNC) dataset. Trained listeners provided ratings of intelligibility, articulation, voice quality, phonation, speech rate, nasality, and background noise on speech. Strong correlations were found between subjective intelligibility, articulation, and voice quality, likely due to a shared underlying cause of speech symptoms in our speaker population. Objective measures of intelligibility and speech rate aligned with their subjective counterpart. Our results suggest that a single intelligibility measure may be sufficient for the clinical monitoring of speakers treated for HNC using concomitant chemoradiation.

User simulators are essential to conversational AI, enabling scalable agent development and evaluation through simulated interactions. While current Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced user simulation capabilities, we reveal that they struggle to consistently demonstrate goal-oriented behavior across multi-turn conversations--a critical limitation that compromises their reliability in downstream applications. We introduce User Goal State Tracking (UGST), a novel framework that tracks user goal progression throughout conversations. Leveraging UGST, we present a three-stage methodology for developing user simulators that can autonomously track goal progression and reason to generate goal-aligned responses. Moreover, we establish comprehensive evaluation metrics for measuring goal alignment in user simulators, and demonstrate that our approach yields substantial improvements across two benchmarks (MultiWOZ 2.4 and τ-Bench). Our contributions address a critical gap in conversational AI and establish UGST as an essential framework for developing goal-aligned user simulators.

Inspecting large-scale industrial surfaces like aircraft fuselages for quality control requires capturing their precise 3D surface geometry at high resolution. Vision-based tactile sensors (VBTSs) offer high local resolution but require slow 'press-and-lift' measurements stitched for large areas. Approaches with sliding or roller/belt VBTS designs provide measurements continuity. However, they face significant challenges respectively: sliding struggles with friction/wear and both approaches are speed-limited by conventional camera frame rates and motion blur, making large-area scanning time consuming. Thus, a rapid, continuous, high-resolution method is needed. We introduce a novel tactile sensor integrating a neuromorphic camera in a rolling mechanism to achieve this. Leveraging its high temporal resolution and robustness to motion blur, our system uses a modified event-based multi-view stereo approach for 3D reconstruction. We demonstrate state-of-the-art scanning speeds up to 0.5 m/s, achieving Mean Absolute Error below 100 microns -- 11 times faster than prior continuous tactile sensing methods. A multi-reference Bayesian fusion strategy enhances accuracy (reducing MAE by 25.2\% compared to EMVS) and mitigates curvature errors. We also validate high-speed feature recognition via Braille reading 2.6 times faster than previous approaches.

Weak-to-Strong generalization (W2SG) is a new trend to elicit the full capabilities of a strong model with supervision from a weak model. While existing W2SG studies focus on simple tasks like binary classification, we extend this paradigm to complex interactive decision-making environments. Specifically, we fine-tune a strong model with trajectories of intermediate actions generated by a weak model. Motivated by the human learning process, we propose to generalize not only success knowledge but also failure experience so that the strong model can learn from failed trajectories accumulated by weak models. To effectively and efficiently elicit the potential of strong agents, we further construct ``trajectory trees," a hierarchical representation that organizes weak model-generated action trajectories, coupled with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to optimize the strong model. Through theoretical analysis, we provide formal guarantees for the effectiveness of our method in improving W2SG performance. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate substantial improvements in reasoning and decision-making capabilities across diverse task domains, validating the scalability and robustness of our proposed framework.

Over the past decade, advances in generative modeling, such as generative adversarial networks, masked autoencoders, and diffusion models, have significantly transformed biological research and discovery, enabling breakthroughs in molecule design, protein generation, catalysis discovery, drug discovery, and beyond. At the same time, biological applications have served as valuable testbeds for evaluating the capabilities of generative models. Recently, flow matching has emerged as a powerful and efficient alternative to diffusion-based generative modeling, with growing interest in its application to problems in biology and life sciences. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of recent developments in flow matching and its applications in biological domains. We begin by systematically reviewing the foundations and variants of flow matching, and then categorize its applications into three major areas: biological sequence modeling, molecule generation and design, and peptide and protein generation. For each, we provide an in-depth review of recent progress. We also summarize commonly used datasets and software tools, and conclude with a discussion of potential future directions. The corresponding curated resources are available at https://github.com/Violet24K/Awesome-Flow-Matching-Meets-Biology.

We propose a vision transformer (ViT)-based deep learning framework to refine disaster-affected area segmentation from remote sensing imagery, aiming to support and enhance the Emergent Value Added Product (EVAP) developed by the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA). The process starts with a small set of manually annotated regions. We then apply principal component analysis (PCA)-based feature space analysis and construct a confidence index (CI) to expand these labels, producing a weakly supervised training set. These expanded labels are then used to train ViT-based encoder-decoder models with multi-band inputs from Sentinel-2 and Formosat-5 imagery. Our architecture supports multiple decoder variants and multi-stage loss strategies to improve performance under limited supervision. During the evaluation, model predictions are compared with higher-resolution EVAP output to assess spatial coherence and segmentation consistency. Case studies on the 2022 Poyang Lake drought and the 2023 Rhodes wildfire demonstrate that our framework improves the smoothness and reliability of segmentation results, offering a scalable approach for disaster mapping when accurate ground truth is unavailable.

Non-destructive testing (NDT), particularly X-ray inspection, is vital for industrial quality assurance, yet existing deep-learning-based approaches often lack interactivity, interpretability, and the capacity for critical self-assessment, limiting their reliability and operator trust. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes InsightX Agent, a novel LMM-based agentic framework designed to deliver reliable, interpretable, and interactive X-ray NDT analysis. Unlike typical sequential pipelines, InsightX Agent positions a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) as a central orchestrator, coordinating between the Sparse Deformable Multi-Scale Detector (SDMSD) and the Evidence-Grounded Reflection (EGR) tool. The SDMSD generates dense defect region proposals from multi-scale feature maps and sparsifies them through Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), optimizing detection of small, dense targets in X-ray images while maintaining computational efficiency. The EGR tool guides the LMM agent through a chain-of-thought-inspired review process, incorporating context assessment, individual defect analysis, false positive elimination, confidence recalibration and quality assurance to validate and refine the SDMSD's initial proposals. By strategically employing and intelligently using tools, InsightX Agent moves beyond passive data processing to active reasoning, enhancing diagnostic reliability and providing interpretations that integrate diverse information sources. Experimental evaluations on the GDXray+ dataset demonstrate that InsightX Agent not only achieves a high object detection F1-score of 96.54\% but also offers significantly improved interpretability and trustworthiness in its analyses, highlighting the transformative potential of LMM-based agentic frameworks for industrial inspection tasks.

Verifiers--functions assigning rewards to agent behavior--have been key to AI progress in math, code, and games. However, extending gains to domains without clear-cut success criteria remains a challenge: while humans can recognize desired outcomes, translating this intuition into scalable rules is nontrivial. Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) offer a promising solution, given their world knowledge, human-preference alignment, and reasoning capabilities. We evaluate MLLM verifiers across web navigation, computer use, and robotics, spanning 13+ models, 28+ designs, and thousands of trajectories from diverse agents. We identify a critical limitation: a strong tendency for MLLMs to over-validate agent behavior--a phenomenon we term agreement bias. This bias is pervasive, resilient to test-time scaling, and can harm applications relying on MLLM judgments/rewards (e.g., self-improvement, steering, online supervision). We discuss several considerations for evaluating and designing MLLM verifiers, and introduce SGV, a lightweight method that better leverages their capabilities by modulating (un)conditional generation. First, an MLLM is elicited to generate broad priors about desired behavior, independent of the data under evaluation. Then, conditioned on self-generated priors, it reasons over and evaluates a candidate trajectory. Our methods yield more human-aligned verifiers, improving failure detection by 25pp and accuracy by 14pp. In self-improvement and online supervision, they boost task completion of a GUI specialist in OSWorld, a diffusion policy in robomimic, and a ReAct agent in VisualWebArena--surpassing the previous state of the art by 20pp. As a byproduct, we release an update of VisualWebArena featuring strong agent baselines, more human-aligned oracles, container parallelism with high fidelity and proper resets, >10x speedups, and VWA-Lite, a 1/3 subset with comparable evaluation fidelity.

Deep learning methods for Visual Place Recognition (VPR) have advanced significantly, largely driven by large-scale datasets. However, most existing approaches are trained on a single dataset, which can introduce dataset-specific inductive biases and limit model generalization. While multi-dataset joint training offers a promising solution for developing universal VPR models, divergences among training datasets can saturate the limited information capacity in feature aggregation layers, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose Query-based Adaptive Aggregation (QAA), a novel feature aggregation technique that leverages learned queries as reference codebooks to effectively enhance information capacity without significant computational or parameter complexity. We show that computing the Cross-query Similarity (CS) between query-level image features and reference codebooks provides a simple yet effective way to generate robust descriptors. Our results demonstrate that QAA outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving balanced generalization across diverse datasets while maintaining peak performance comparable to dataset-specific models. Ablation studies further explore QAA's mechanisms and scalability. Visualizations reveal that the learned queries exhibit diverse attention patterns across datasets. Project page: http://xjh19971.github.io/QAA.

Despite years of research and the dramatic scaling of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, a striking misalignment between artificial and human vision persists. Contrary to humans, AI relies heavily on texture-features rather than shape information, lacks robustness to image distortions, remains highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and struggles to recognise simple abstract shapes within complex backgrounds. To close this gap, here we take inspiration from how human vision develops from early infancy into adulthood. We quantified visual maturation by synthesising decades of research into a novel developmental visual diet (DVD) for AI vision. Guiding AI systems through this human-inspired curriculum, which considers the development of visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, and colour, produces models that better align with human behaviour on every hallmark of robust vision tested, yielding the strongest reported reliance on shape information to date, abstract shape recognition beyond the state of the art, and higher resilience to image corruptions and adversarial attacks. Our results thus demonstrate that robust AI vision can be achieved by guiding how a model learns, not merely how much it learns, offering a resource-efficient route toward safer and more human-like artificial visual systems.

Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation (OVCOS) seeks to segment and classify camouflaged objects from arbitrary categories, presenting unique challenges due to visual ambiguity and unseen categories.Recent approaches typically adopt a two-stage paradigm: first segmenting objects, then classifying the segmented regions using Vision Language Models (VLMs).However, these methods (1) suffer from a domain gap caused by the mismatch between VLMs' full-image training and cropped-region inference, and (2) depend on generic segmentation models optimized for well-delineated objects, making them less effective for camouflaged objects.Without explicit guidance, generic segmentation models often overlook subtle boundaries, leading to imprecise segmentation.In this paper,we introduce a novel VLM-guided cascaded framework to address these issues in OVCOS.For segmentation, we leverage the Segment Anything Model (SAM), guided by the VLM.Our framework uses VLM-derived features as explicit prompts to SAM, effectively directing attention to camouflaged regions and significantly improving localization accuracy.For classification, we avoid the domain gap introduced by hard cropping.Instead, we treat the segmentation output as a soft spatial prior via the alpha channel, which retains the full image context while providing precise spatial guidance, leading to more accurate and context-aware classification of camouflaged objects.The same VLM is shared across both segmentation and classification to ensure efficiency and semantic consistency.Extensive experiments on both OVCOS and conventional camouflaged object segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the clear superiority of our method, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging rich VLM semantics for both segmentation and classification of camouflaged objects.

Universal photometric stereo (PS) is defined by two factors: it must (i) operate under arbitrary, unknown lighting conditions and (ii) avoid reliance on specific illumination models. Despite progress (e.g., SDM UniPS), two challenges remain. First, current encoders cannot guarantee that illumination and normal information are decoupled. To enforce decoupling, we introduce LINO UniPS with two key components: (i) Light Register Tokens with light alignment supervision to aggregate point, direction, and environment lights; (ii) Interleaved Attention Block featuring global cross-image attention that takes all lighting conditions together so the encoder can factor out lighting while retaining normal-related evidence. Second, high-frequency geometric details are easily lost. We address this with (i) a Wavelet-based Dual-branch Architecture and (ii) a Normal-gradient Perception Loss. These techniques yield a unified feature space in which lighting is explicitly represented by register tokens, while normal details are preserved via wavelet branch. We further introduce PS-Verse, a large-scale synthetic dataset graded by geometric complexity and lighting diversity, and adopt curriculum training from simple to complex scenes. Extensive experiments show new state-of-the-art results on public benchmarks (e.g., DiLiGenT, Luces), stronger generalization to real materials, and improved efficiency; ablations confirm that Light Register Tokens + Interleaved Attention Block drive better feature decoupling, while Wavelet-based Dual-branch Architecture + Normal-gradient Perception Loss recover finer details.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards~(RLVR) has emerged as a powerful learn-to-reason paradigm for large reasoning models to tackle complex tasks. However, the current RLVR paradigm is still not efficient enough, as it works in a trial-and-error manner. To perform better, the model needs to explore the reward space by numerously generating responses and learn from fragmented reward signals, blind to the overall reward patterns. Fortunately, verifiable rewards make the natural language description of the reward function possible, and meanwhile, LLMs have demonstrated strong in-context learning ability. This motivates us to explore if large reasoning models can benefit from a \textbf{motivation} of the task, \textit{i.e.}, awareness of the reward function, during the reinforcement finetuning process, as we humans sometimes do when learning. In this paper, we introduce \textit{\textbf{M}otivation-\textbf{e}nhanced \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{F}inetuning}~(\textbf{MeRF}), an intuitive yet effective method enhancing reinforcement finetuning of LLMs by involving \emph{``telling LLMs rules of the game''}. Specifically, \textbf{MeRF} directly injects the reward specification into the prompt, which serves as an in-context motivation for the model to be aware of the optimization objective. This simple modification leverages the in-context learning ability of LLMs, aligning generation with optimization, thereby incentivizing the model to generate desired outputs from both inner motivation and external reward. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that \textbf{MeRF} achieves substantial performance gains over the RLVR baseline. Moreover, ablation studies show that MeRF performs better with greater consistency between the in-context motivation and the external reward function, while the model also demonstrates an ability to adapt to misleading motivations through reinforcement finetuning.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as an effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its performance is highly dependent on the quality of the underlying human preference data. To address this bottleneck, prior work has explored various data selection strategies, but these methods often overlook the impact of the evolving states of the language model during the optimization process. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem: Sample Scheduling for DPO, which aims to dynamically and adaptively schedule training samples based on the model's evolving batch-wise states throughout preference optimization. To solve this problem, we propose SamS, an efficient and effective algorithm that adaptively selects samples in each training batch based on the LLM's learning feedback to maximize the potential generalization performance. Notably, without modifying the core DPO algorithm, simply integrating SamS significantly improves performance across tasks, with minimal additional computational overhead. This work points to a promising new direction for improving LLM alignment through batch-wise sample selection, with potential generalization to RLHF and broader supervised learning paradigms.

Instance segmentation is essential for applications such as automated monitoring of plant health, growth, and yield. However, extensive effort is required to create large-scale datasets with pixel-level annotations of each object instance for developing instance segmentation models that restrict the use of deep learning in these areas. This challenge is more significant in images with densely packed, self-occluded objects, which are common in agriculture. To address this challenge, we propose a semi-self-supervised learning approach that requires minimal manual annotation to develop a high-performing instance segmentation model. We design GLMask, an image-mask representation for the model to focus on shape, texture, and pattern while minimizing its dependence on color features. We develop a pipeline to generate semantic segmentation and then transform it into instance-level segmentation. The proposed approach substantially outperforms the conventional instance segmentation models, establishing a state-of-the-art wheat head instance segmentation model with mAP@50 of 98.5%. Additionally, we assessed the proposed methodology on the general-purpose Microsoft COCO dataset, achieving a significant performance improvement of over 12.6% mAP@50. This highlights that the utility of our proposed approach extends beyond precision agriculture and applies to other domains, specifically those with similar data characteristics.

Embodied agents need to plan and act reliably in real and complex 3D environments. Classical planning (e.g., PDDL) offers structure and guarantees, but in practice it fails under noisy perception and incorrect predicate grounding. On the other hand, Large Language Models (LLMs)-based planners leverage commonsense reasoning, yet frequently propose actions that are unfeasible or unsafe. Following recent works that combine the two approaches, we introduce ContextMatters, a framework that fuses LLMs and classical planning to perform hierarchical goal relaxation: the LLM helps ground symbols to the scene and, when the target is unreachable, it proposes functionally equivalent goals that progressively relax constraints, adapting the goal to the context of the agent's environment. Operating on 3D Scene Graphs, this mechanism turns many nominally unfeasible tasks into tractable plans and enables context-aware partial achievement when full completion is not achievable. Our experimental results show a +52.45% Success Rate improvement over state-of-the-art LLMs+PDDL baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Moreover, we validate the execution of ContextMatter in a real world scenario by deploying it on a TIAGo robot. Code, dataset, and supplementary materials are available to the community at https://lab-rococo-sapienza.github.io/context-matters/.

This paper presents BemaGANv2, an advanced GAN-based vocoder designed for high-fidelity and long-term audio generation, with a focus on systematic evaluation of discriminator combination strategies. Long-term audio generation is critical for applications in Text-to-Music (TTM) and Text-to-Audio (TTA) systems, where maintaining temporal co- herence, prosodic consistency, and harmonic structure over extended durations remains a significant challenge. Built upon the original BemaGAN architecture, BemaGANv2 incorporates major architectural innovations by replacing traditional ResBlocks in the generator with the Anti-aliased Multi-Periodicity composition (AMP) module, which internally applies the Snake activation function to better model periodic structures. In the discriminator framework, we integrate the Multi-Envelope Discriminator (MED), a novel architecture we proposed, to extract rich temporal en- velope features crucial for periodicity detection. Coupled with the Multi-Resolution Discriminator (MRD), this com- bination enables more accurate modeling of long-range dependencies in audio. We systematically evaluate various discriminator configurations, including Multi-Scale Discriminator (MSD) + MED, MSD + MRD, and Multi-Period Discriminator (MPD) + MED + MRD, using objective metrics (Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD), Structural Similar- ity Index (SSIM), Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC), Mel-Cepstral Distortion (MCD), Multi-Resolution STFT (M-STFT), Periodicity error (Periodicity)) and subjective evaluations (MOS, SMOS). To support reproducibility, we provide detailed architectural descriptions, training configurations, and complete implementation details. The code, pre-trained models, and audio demo samples are available at: https://github.com/dinhoitt/BemaGANv2.

Traditional algorithms to optimize artificial neural networks when confronted with a supervised learning task are usually exploitation-type relaxational dynamics such as gradient descent (GD). Here, we explore the dynamics of the neural network trajectory along training for unconventionally large learning rates. We show that for a region of values of the learning rate, the GD optimization shifts away from purely exploitation-like algorithm into a regime of exploration-exploitation balance, as the neural network is still capable of learning but the trajectory shows sensitive dependence on initial conditions --as characterized by positive network maximum Lyapunov exponent--. Interestingly, the characteristic training time required to reach an acceptable accuracy in the test set reaches a minimum precisely in such learning rate region, further suggesting that one can accelerate the training of artificial neural networks by locating at the onset of chaos. Our results --initially illustrated for the MNIST classification task-- qualitatively hold for a range of supervised learning tasks, {learning architectures (including both shallow and deep multilayer perceptrons and convolutional neural networks) and other hyperparameters (different activation functions and weight regularisation),} and showcase the emergent, constructive role of transient chaotic dynamics in the training of artificial neural networks.