Multimodal fusion is susceptible to modality imbalance, where dominant modalities overshadow weak ones, easily leading to biased learning and suboptimal fusion, especially for incomplete modality conditions. To address this problem, we propose a Shapley-guided alternating training framework that adaptively prioritizes minor modalities to balance and thus enhance the fusion. Our method leverages Shapley Value-based scheduling to improve the training sequence adaptively, ensuring that under-optimized modalities receive sufficient learning. Additionally, we introduce the memory module to refine and inherit modality-specific representations with a cross-modal mapping mechanism to align features at both the feature and sample levels. To further validate the adaptability of the proposed approach, the encoder module empirically adopts both conventional and LLM-based backbones. With building up a novel multimodal equilibrium metric, namely, equilibrium deviation metric (EDM), we evaluate the performance in both balance and accuracy across four multimodal benchmark datasets, where our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Meanwhile, robustness analysis under missing modalities highlights its strong generalization capabilities. Accordingly, our findings reveal the untapped potential of alternating training, demonstrating that strategic modality prioritization fundamentally balances and promotes multimodal learning, offering a new paradigm for optimizing multimodal training dynamics.

Training time-series forecast models presents unique challenges in designing effective learning objectives. Existing methods predominantly utilize the temporal mean squared error, which faces two critical challenges: (1) label autocorrelation, which leads to bias from the label sequence likelihood; (2) excessive amount of tasks, which increases with the forecast horizon and complicates optimization. To address these challenges, we propose Time-o1, a transformation-augmented learning objective tailored for time-series forecasting. The central idea is to transform the label sequence into decorrelated components with discriminated significance. Models are then trained to align the most significant components, thereby effectively mitigating label autocorrelation and reducing task amount. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Time-o1 achieves state-of-the-art performance and is compatible with various forecast models. Code is available at https://github.com/Master-PLC/Time-o1.

Histopathological analysis is a cornerstone of cancer diagnosis, with Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining routinely acquired for every patient to visualize cell morphology and tissue architecture. On the other hand, multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) enables more precise cell type identification via proteomic markers, but has yet to achieve widespread clinical adoption due to cost and logistical constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce MIPHEI (Multiplex Immunofluorescence Prediction from H&E Images), a U-Net-inspired architecture that leverages a ViT pathology foundation model as encoder to predict mIF signals from H&E images using rich pretrained representations. MIPHEI targets a comprehensive panel of markers spanning nuclear content, immune lineages (T cells, B cells, myeloid), epithelium, stroma, vasculature, and proliferation. We train our model using the publicly available OrionCRC dataset of restained H&E and mIF images from colorectal cancer tissue, and validate it on five independent datasets: HEMIT, PathoCell, IMMUcan, Lizard and PanNuke. On OrionCRC test set, MIPHEI achieves accurate cell-type classification from H&E alone, with F1 scores of 0.93 for Pan-CK, 0.83 for alpha-SMA, 0.68 for CD3e, 0.36 for CD20, and 0.28 for CD68, substantially outperforming both a state-of-the-art baseline and a random classifier for most markers. Our results indicate that, for some molecular markers, our model captures the complex relationships between nuclear morphologies in their tissue context, as visible in H&E images and molecular markers defining specific cell types. MIPHEI offers a promising step toward enabling cell-type-aware analysis of large-scale H&E datasets, in view of uncovering relationships between spatial cellular organization and patient outcomes.

We present SuperDec, an approach for creating compact 3D scene representations via decomposition into superquadric primitives. While most recent works leverage geometric primitives to obtain photorealistic 3D scene representations, we propose to leverage them to obtain a compact yet expressive representation. We propose to solve the problem locally on individual objects and leverage the capabilities of instance segmentation methods to scale our solution to full 3D scenes. In doing that, we design a new architecture which efficiently decompose point clouds of arbitrary objects in a compact set of superquadrics. We train our architecture on ShapeNet and we prove its generalization capabilities on object instances extracted from the ScanNet++ dataset as well as on full Replica scenes. Finally, we show how a compact representation based on superquadrics can be useful for a diverse range of downstream applications, including robotic tasks and controllable visual content generation and editing.

Video understanding models often struggle with high computational requirements, extensive parameter counts, and slow inference speed, making them inefficient for practical use. To tackle these challenges, we propose Mobile-VideoGPT, an efficient multimodal framework designed to operate with fewer than a billion parameters. Unlike traditional video large multimodal models (LMMs), Mobile-VideoGPT consists of lightweight dual visual encoders, efficient projectors, and a small language model (SLM), enabling real-time throughput. To further improve efficiency, we present an Attention-Based Frame Scoring mechanism to select the key-frames, along with an efficient token projector that prunes redundant visual tokens and preserves essential contextual cues. We evaluate our model across well-established six video understanding benchmarks (e.g., MVBench, EgoSchema, NextQA, and PercepTest). Our results show that Mobile-VideoGPT-0.5B can generate up to 46 tokens per second while outperforming existing state-of-the-art 0.5B-parameter models by 6 points on average with 40% fewer parameters and more than 2x higher throughput. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/Amshaker/Mobile-VideoGPT.

In recent years, general-purpose large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek have advanced at an unprecedented pace. Despite these achievements, their application to finance remains challenging, due to fragmented data sources, intransparent reasoning processes, and weak transferability to business applications. In response, we introduce Fin-R1, a reasoning LLM designed for financial scenarios. With a compact size of 7 billion parameters, Fin-R1 reduces deployment costs while addressing the aforementioned challenges. Its development follows a two-stage pipeline. First, we construct Fin-R1-Data, a high-quality financial dataset consisting of 60,091 chain-of-thought (CoT) samples, distilled and filtered from multiple authoritative benchmarks to ensure consistency and reliability. Second, we train Fin-R1 using Fin-R1-Data through supervised fine-tuning (SFT), followed by reinforcement learning (RL). This stage substantially improves the model's ability to solve complex financial reasoning tasks, yielding outputs that are both accurate and interpretable. Despite its relatively small parameter scale, Fin-R1 achieves competitive empirical performance across established financial benchmarks and demonstrates practical utility in compliance checking and robo-advisory. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/SUFE-AIFLM-Lab/Fin-R1, and has already attracted over 700 stars.

The ability of artificial intelligence agents to make optimal decisions and generalise them to different domains and tasks is compromised in complex scenarios. One way to address this issue has focused on learning efficient representations of the world and on how the actions of agents affect them in state-action transitions. Whereas such representations are procedurally efficient, they lack structural richness. To address this problem, we propose to enhance the agent's ontology and extend the traditional conceptualisation of trajectories to provide a more nuanced view of task execution. Structurally Enriched Trajectories (SETs) extend the encoding of sequences of states and their transitions by incorporating hierarchical relations between objects, interactions, and affordances. SETs are built as multi-level graphs, providing a detailed representation of the agent dynamics and a transferable functional abstraction of the task. SETs are integrated into an architecture, Structurally Enriched Trajectory Learning and Encoding (SETLE), that employs a heterogeneous graph-based memory structure of multi-level relational dependencies essential for generalisation. We demonstrate that SETLE can support downstream tasks, enabling agents to recognise task relevant structural patterns across CREATE and MiniGrid environments. Finally, we integrate SETLE with reinforcement learning and show measurable improvements in downstream performance, including breakthrough success rates in complex, sparse-reward tasks.

Hallucinated outputs from large language models (LLMs) pose risks in the medical domain, especially for lay audiences making health-related decisions. Existing automatic factual consistency evaluation methods, such as entailment- and question-answering (QA) -based, struggle with plain language summarization (PLS) due to elaborative explanation phenomenon, which introduces external content (e.g., definitions, background, examples) absent from the scientific abstract to enhance comprehension. To address this, we introduce PlainQAFact, an automatic factual consistency evaluation metric trained on a fine-grained, human-annotated dataset PlainFact, for evaluating factual consistency of both source-simplified and elaborately explained sentences. PlainQAFact first classifies sentence type, then applies a retrieval-augmented QA scoring method. Empirical results show that existing evaluation metrics fail to evaluate the factual consistency in PLS, especially for elaborative explanations, whereas PlainQAFact consistently outperforms them across all evaluation settings. We further analyze PlainQAFact's effectiveness across external knowledge sources, answer extraction strategies, answer overlap measures, and document granularity levels, refining its overall factual consistency assessment. Taken together, our work presents a sentence-aware, retrieval-augmented metric targeted at elaborative explanations in biomedical PLS tasks, providing the community with both a new benchmark and a practical evaluation tool to advance reliable and safe plain language communication in the medical domain. PlainQAFact and PlainFact are available at: https://github.com/zhiwenyou103/PlainQAFact

Short-term precipitation nowcasting is essential for flood management, transportation, energy system operations, and emergency response. However, many existing models fail to fully exploit the extensive atmospheric information available, relying primarily on precipitation data alone. This study examines whether integrating multi variable weather-station measurements with radar can enhance nowcasting skill and introduces two complementary architectures that integrate multi variable station data with radar images. The SmaAt-fUsion model extends the SmaAt-UNet framework by incorporating weather station data through a convolutional layer, integrating it into the bottleneck of the network; The SmaAt-Krige-GNet model combines precipitation maps with weather station data processed using Kriging, a geo-statistical interpolation method, to generate variable-specific maps. These maps are then utilized in a dual-encoder architecture based on SmaAt-GNet, allowing multi-level data integration. Experimental evaluations were conducted using four years (2016--2019) of weather station and precipitation radar data from the Netherlands. Results demonstrate that SmaAt-Krige-GNet outperforms the standard SmaAt-UNet, which relies solely on precipitation radar data, in low precipitation scenarios, while SmaAt-fUsion surpasses SmaAt-UNet in both low and high precipitation scenarios. This highlights the potential of incorporating discrete weather station data to enhance the performance of deep learning-based weather nowcasting models.

The growing interest in eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has stimulated research on models with built-in interpretability, among which part-prototype models are particularly prominent. Part-Prototype Models (PPMs) classify inputs by comparing them to learned prototypes and provide human-understandable explanations of the form "this looks like that". Despite this intrinsic interpretability, PPMs have not yet emerged as a competitive alternative to post-hoc explanation methods. This survey reviews work published between 2019 and 2025 and derives a taxonomy of the challenges faced by current PPMs. The analysis reveals a diverse set of open problems. The main issue concerns the quality and number of learned prototypes. Further challenges include limited generalization across tasks and contexts, as well as methodological shortcomings such as non-standardized evaluation. Five broad research directions are identified: improving predictive performance, developing theoretically grounded architectures, establishing frameworks for human-AI collaboration, aligning models with human concepts, and defining robust metrics and benchmarks for evaluation. The survey aims to stimulate further research and promote intrinsically interpretable models for practical applications. A curated list of the surveyed papers is available at https://github.com/aix-group/ppm-survey.

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on general-purpose text embedding tasks. While dense embeddings have dominated related research, we introduce the first lexicon-based embeddings (LENS) leveraging LLMs that achieve competitive performance on these tasks. LENS consolidates the vocabulary space through token embedding clustering to handle the issue of token redundancy in LLM vocabularies. To further improve performance, we investigate bidirectional attention and various pooling strategies. Specifically, LENS simplifies lexical matching with redundant vocabularies by assigning each dimension to a specific token cluster, where semantically similar tokens are grouped together. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LENS outperforms dense embeddings on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), delivering compact representations with dimensionality comparable to dense counterparts. Furthermore, LENS inherently supports efficient embedding dimension pruning without any specialized objectives like Matryoshka Representation Learning. Notably, combining LENS with dense embeddings achieves state-of-the-art performance on the retrieval subset of MTEB (i.e., BEIR).

Recent advances in diffusion and flow-based generative models have demonstrated remarkable success in image restoration tasks, achieving superior perceptual quality compared to traditional deep learning approaches. However, these methods either require numerous sampling steps to generate high-quality images, resulting in significant computational overhead, or rely on common model distillation, which usually imposes a fixed fidelity-realism trade-off and thus lacks flexibility. In this paper, we introduce OFTSR, a novel flow-based framework for one-step image super-resolution that can produce outputs with tunable levels of fidelity and realism. Our approach first trains a conditional flow-based super-resolution model to serve as a teacher model. We then distill this teacher model by applying a specialized constraint. Specifically, we force the predictions from our one-step student model for same input to lie on the same sampling ODE trajectory of the teacher model. This alignment ensures that the student model's single-step predictions from initial states match the teacher's predictions from a closer intermediate state. Through extensive experiments on datasets including FFHQ (256$\times$256), DIV2K, and ImageNet (256$\times$256), we demonstrate that OFTSR achieves state-of-the-art performance for one-step image super-resolution, while having the ability to flexibly tune the fidelity-realism trade-off. Codes: \href{https://github.com/yuanzhi-zhu/OFTSR}{https://github.com/yuanzhi-zhu/OFTSR}.

Cross-modal contrastive distillation has recently been explored for learning effective 3D representations. However, existing methods focus primarily on modality-shared features, neglecting the modality-specific features during the pre-training process, which leads to suboptimal representations. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the limitations of current contrastive methods for 3D representation learning and propose a new framework, namely CMCR (Cross-Modal Comprehensive Representation Learning), to address these shortcomings. Our approach improves upon traditional methods by better integrating both modality-shared and modality-specific features. Specifically, we introduce masked image modeling and occupancy estimation tasks to guide the network in learning more comprehensive modality-specific features. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-modal unified codebook that learns an embedding space shared across different modalities. Besides, we introduce geometry-enhanced masked image modeling to further boost 3D representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method mitigates the challenges faced by traditional approaches and consistently outperforms existing image-to-LiDAR contrastive distillation methods in downstream tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Eaphan/CMCR.

The paper presents a pilot exploration of the construction, management and analysis of a multimodal corpus. Through a three-layer annotation that provides orthographic, prosodic, and gestural transcriptions, the Gest-IT resource allows to investigate the variation of gesture-making patterns in conversations between sighted people and people with visual impairment. After discussing the transcription methods and technical procedures employed in our study, we propose a unified CoNLL-U corpus and indicate our future steps

Designing a generalist scientific agent capable of performing tasks in laboratory settings to assist researchers has become a key goal in recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Unlike everyday tasks, scientific tasks are inherently more delicate and complex, requiring agents to possess a higher level of reasoning ability, structured and temporal understanding of their environment, and a strong emphasis on safety. Existing approaches often fail to address these multifaceted requirements. To tackle these challenges, we present DAVIS. Unlike traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches, DAVIS incorporates structured and temporal memory, which enables model-based planning. Additionally, DAVIS implements an agentic, multi-turn retrieval system, similar to a human's inner monologue, allowing for a greater degree of reasoning over past experiences. DAVIS demonstrates substantially improved performance on the ScienceWorld benchmark comparing to previous approaches on 8 out of 9 elementary science subjects. In addition, DAVIS's World Model demonstrates competitive performance on the famous HotpotQA and MusiqueQA dataset for multi-hop question answering. To the best of our knowledge, DAVIS is the first RAG agent to employ an interactive retrieval method in a RAG pipeline.

Generating realistic training data for supervised learning remains a significant challenge in artificial intelligence, particularly in domains where large, expert-labeled datasets are scarce or costly to obtain. This is especially true for electrocardiograms (ECGs), where privacy constraints, class imbalance, and the need for physician annotation limit the availability of labeled 12-lead recordings, motivating the development of high-fidelity synthetic ECG data. The primary challenge in this task lies in accurately modeling the intricate biological and physiological interactions among different ECG leads. Although mathematical process models have shed light on these dynamics, effectively incorporating this understanding into generative models is not straightforward. We introduce an innovative method that employs ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to enhance the fidelity of 12-lead ECG data generation. This approach integrates cardiac dynamics directly into the generative optimization process via a novel Euler Loss, producing biologically plausible data that respects real-world variability and inter-lead constraints. Empirical analysis on the G12EC and PTB-XL datasets demonstrates that augmenting training data with MultiODE-GAN yields consistent, statistically significant improvements in specificity across multiple cardiac abnormalities. This highlights the value of enforcing physiological coherence in synthetic medical data.

Automated reasoning is a key technology in the young but rapidly growing field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Explanability helps build trust in artificial intelligence systems beyond their mere predictive accuracy and robustness. In this paper, we propose a cycle of scientific discovery that combines machine learning with automated reasoning for the generation and the selection of explanations. We present a taxonomy of explanation selection problems that draws on insights from sociology and cognitive science. These selection criteria subsume existing notions and extend them with new properties.

Examining Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs) is a pivotal element in the process of drug development. DDIs occur when one drug's properties are affected by the inclusion of other drugs. Detecting favorable DDIs has the potential to pave the way for creating and advancing innovative medications applicable in practical settings. However, existing DDI prediction models continue to face challenges related to generalization in extreme cases, robust feature extraction, and real-life application possibilities. We aim to address these challenges by leveraging the effectiveness of context-aware deep graph learning by introducing a novel framework named CADGL. Based on a customized variational graph autoencoder (VGAE), we capture critical structural and physio-chemical information using two context preprocessors for feature extraction from two different perspectives: local neighborhood and molecular context, in a heterogeneous graphical structure. Our customized VGAE consists of a graph encoder, a latent information encoder, and an MLP decoder. CADGL surpasses other state-of-the-art DDI prediction models, excelling in predicting clinically valuable novel DDIs, supported by rigorous case studies. CADGL is vailable at: https://github.com/azminewasi/cadgl

Decision diagrams (DDs) have emerged as a state-of-the-art method for exact multiobjective integer linear programming. When the DD is too large to fit into memory or the decision-maker prefers a fast approximation to the Pareto frontier, the complete DD must be restricted to a subset of its states (or nodes). We introduce new node-selection heuristics for constructing restricted DDs that produce a high-quality approximation of the Pareto frontier. Depending on the structure of the problem, our heuristics are based on either simple rules, machine learning with feature engineering, or end-to-end deep learning. Experiments on multiobjective knapsack, set packing, and traveling salesperson problems show that our approach is highly effective, recovering over 85% of the Pareto frontier while achieving 2.5x speedups over exact DD enumeration on average, with very few non-Pareto solutions. The code is available at https://github.com/rahulptel/HMORDD.

Understanding the relationship between the depth of a neural network and its representational capacity is a central problem in deep learning theory. In this work, we develop a geometric framework to analyze the expressivity of ReLU networks with the notion of depth complexity for convex polytopes. The depth of a polytope recursively quantifies the number of alternating convex hull and Minkowski sum operations required to construct it. This geometric perspective serves as a rigorous tool for deriving depth lower bounds and understanding the structural limits of deep neural architectures. We establish lower and upper bounds on the depth of polytopes, as well as tight bounds for classical families. These results yield two main consequences. First, we provide a purely geometric proof of the expressivity bound by Arora et al. (2018), confirming that $\lceil \log_2(n+1)\rceil$ hidden layers suffice to represent any continuous piecewise linear (CPWL) function. Second, we prove that, unlike general ReLU networks, convex polytopes do not admit a universal depth bound. Specifically, the depth of cyclic polytopes in dimensions $n \geq 4$ grows unboundedly with the number of vertices. This result implies that Input Convex Neural Networks (ICNNs) cannot represent all convex CPWL functions with a fixed depth, revealing a sharp separation in expressivity between ICNNs and standard ReLU networks.

In the past several years, the last-iterate convergence of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm has triggered people's interest due to its good performance in practice but lack of theoretical understanding. For Lipschitz convex functions, different works have established the optimal $O(\log(1/δ)\log T/\sqrt{T})$ or $O(\sqrt{\log(1/δ)/T})$ high-probability convergence rates for the final iterate, where T is the time horizon and δis the failure probability. However, to prove these bounds, all the existing works are either limited to compact domains or require almost surely bounded noise. It is natural to ask whether the last iterate of SGD can still guarantee the optimal convergence rate but without these two restrictive assumptions. Besides this important question, there are still lots of theoretical problems lacking an answer. For example, compared with the last-iterate convergence of SGD for non-smooth problems, only few results for smooth optimization have yet been developed. Additionally, the existing results are all limited to a non-composite objective and the standard Euclidean norm. It still remains unclear whether the last-iterate convergence can be provably extended to wider composite optimization and non-Euclidean norms. In this work, to address the issues mentioned above, we revisit the last-iterate convergence of stochastic gradient methods and provide the first unified way to prove the convergence rates both in expectation and in high probability to accommodate general domains, composite objectives, non-Euclidean norms, Lipschitz conditions, smoothness, and (strong) convexity simultaneously. Additionally, we extend our analysis to obtain the last-iterate convergence under heavy-tailed and sub-Weibull noise.

We present PD-REAL, a novel large-scale dataset for unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) in the 3D domain. It is motivated by the fact that 2D-only representations in the AD task may fail to capture the geometric structures of anomalies due to uncertainty in lighting conditions or shooting angles. PD-REAL consists entirely of Play-Doh models for 15 object categories and focuses on the analysis of potential benefits from 3D information in a controlled environment. Specifically, objects are first created with six types of anomalies, such as \textit{dent}, \textit{crack}, or \textit{perforation}, and then photographed under different lighting conditions to mimic real-world inspection scenarios. To demonstrate the usefulness of 3D information, we use a commercially available RealSense camera to capture RGB and depth images. Compared to the existing 3D dataset for AD tasks, the data acquisition of PD-REAL is significantly cheaper, easily scalable, and easier to control variables. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-scale teacher--student framework with hierarchical distillation for multimodal anomaly detection. This architecture overcomes the inherent limitation of single-scale distillation approaches, which often struggle to reconcile global context with local features. Leveraging multi-level guidance from the teacher network, the student network can effectively capture richer features for anomaly detection. Extensive evaluations with our method and state-of-the-art AD algorithms on our dataset qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the higher detection accuracy of our method. Our dataset can be downloaded from https://github.com/Andy-cs008/PD-REAL

In this paper, we propose a framework to extract the algebra of the transformations of worlds from the perspective of an agent. As a starting point, we use our framework to reproduce the symmetry-based representations from the symmetry-based disentangled representation learning (SBDRL) formalism proposed by [1]; only the algebra of transformations of worlds that form groups can be described using symmetry-based representations. We then study the algebras of the transformations of worlds with features that occur in simple reinforcement learning scenarios. Using computational methods, that we developed, we extract the algebras of the transformations of these worlds and classify them according to their properties. Finally, we generalise two important results of SBDRL - the equivariance condition and the disentangling definition - from only working with symmetry-based representations to working with representations capturing the transformation properties of worlds with transformations for any algebra. Finally, we combine our generalised equivariance condition and our generalised disentangling definition to show that disentangled sub-algebras can each have their own individual equivariance conditions, which can be treated independently.

We propose a method that represents language models by log-likelihood vectors over prompt-response pairs and constructs model maps for comparing their conditional distributions. In this space, distances between models approximate the KL divergence between the corresponding conditional distributions. Experiments on a large collection of publicly available language models show that the maps capture meaningful global structure, including relationships to model attributes and task performance. The method also captures systematic shifts induced by prompt modifications and their approximate additive compositionality, suggesting a way to analyze and predict the effects of composite prompt operations. We further introduce pointwise mutual information (PMI) vectors to reduce the influence of unconditional distributions; in some cases, PMI-based model maps better reflect training-data-related differences. Overall, the framework supports the analysis of input-dependent model behavior.

Accurate localization in autonomous driving is critical for successful missions including environmental mapping and survivor searches. In visually challenging environments, including low-light conditions, overexposure, illumination changes, and high parallax, the performance of conventional visual odometry methods significantly degrade undermining robust robotic navigation. Researchers have recently proposed LiDAR-inertial-visual odometry (LIVO) frameworks, that integrate LiDAR, IMU, and camera sensors, to address these challenges. This paper extends the FAST-LIVO2-based framework by introducing a hybrid approach that integrates direct photometric methods with descriptor-based feature matching. For the descriptor-based feature matching, this work proposes pairs of ORB with the Hamming distance, SuperPoint with SuperGlue, SuperPoint with LightGlue, and XFeat with the mutual nearest neighbor. The proposed configurations are benchmarked by accuracy, computational cost, and feature tracking stability, enabling a quantitative comparison of the adaptability and applicability of visual descriptors. The experimental results reveal that the proposed hybrid approach outperforms the conventional sparse-direct method. Although the sparse-direct method often fails to converge in regions where photometric inconsistency arises due to illumination changes, the proposed approach still maintains robust performance under the same conditions. Furthermore, the hybrid approach with learning-based descriptors enables robust and reliable visual state estimation across challenging environments.

In this paper, we propose and develop a novel nonlocal variational technique based on saturation-value similarity for color image restoration. In traditional nonlocal methods, image patches are extracted from red, green and blue channels of a color image directly, and the color information can not be described finely because the patch similarity is mainly based on the grayscale value of independent channel. The main aim of this paper is to propose and develop a novel nonlocal regularization method by considering the similarity of image patches in saturation-value channel of a color image. In particular, we first establish saturation-value similarity based nonlocal total variation by incorporating saturation-value similarity of color image patches into the proposed nonlocal gradients, which can describe the saturation and value similarity of two adjacent color image patches. The proposed nonlocal variational models are then formulated based on saturation-value similarity based nonlocal total variation. Moreover, we design an effective and efficient algorithm to solve the proposed optimization problem numerically by employing bregmanized operator splitting method, and we also study the convergence of the proposed algorithms. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate that the performance of the proposed models is better than that of other testing methods in terms of visual quality and some quantitative metrics including peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), quaternion structural similarity index (QSSIM) and S-CIELAB color error.

Vision Transformers have excelled in computer vision but their attention mechanisms operate independently across layers, limiting information flow and feature learning. We propose an effective cross-layer attention propagation method that preserves and integrates historical attention matrices across encoder layers, offering a principled refinement of inter-layer information flow in Vision Transformers. This approach enables progressive refinement of attention patterns throughout the transformer hierarchy, enhancing feature acquisition and optimization dynamics. The method requires minimal architectural changes, adding only attention matrix storage and blending operations. Comprehensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements, with ViT performance increasing from 75.74% to 77.07% on CIFAR-100 (+1.33%) and from 57.82% to 59.07% on TinyImageNet (+1.25%). Cross-architecture validation shows similar gains across transformer variants, with CaiT showing 1.01% enhancement. Systematic analysis identifies the blending hyperparameter of historical attention (alpha = 0.45) as optimal across all configurations, providing the ideal balance between current and historical attention information. Random initialization consistently outperforms zero initialization, indicating that diverse initial attention patterns accelerate convergence and improve final performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/banik-s/HAViT.

Evaluating whether explanations faithfully reflect a model's reasoning remains an open problem. Existing benchmarks use single interventions without statistical testing, making it impossible to distinguish genuine faithfulness from chance-level performance. We introduce ICE (Intervention-Consistent Explanation), a framework that compares explanations against matched random baselines via randomization tests under multiple intervention operators, yielding win rates with confidence intervals. Evaluating 7 LLMs across 4 English tasks, 6 non-English languages, and 2 attribution methods, we find that faithfulness is operator-dependent: operator gaps reach up to 44 percentage points, with deletion typically inflating estimates on short text but the pattern reversing on long text, suggesting that faithfulness should be interpreted comparatively across intervention operators rather than as a single score. Randomized baselines reveal anti-faithfulness in one-third of configurations, and faithfulness shows zero correlation with human plausibility (|r| < 0.04). Multilingual evaluation reveals dramatic model-language interactions not explained by tokenization alone. We release the ICE framework and ICEBench benchmark.

Training conversational recommender systems (CRS) requires extensive dialogue data, which is challenging to collect at scale. To address this, researchers have used simulated user-recommender conversations. Traditional simulation approaches often utilize a single large language model (LLM) that generates entire conversations with prior knowledge of the target items, leading to scripted and artificial dialogues. We propose a reference-free simulation framework that trains two independent LLMs, one as the user and one as the conversational recommender. These models interact in real-time without access to predetermined target items, but preference summaries and target attributes, enabling the recommender to genuinely infer user preferences through dialogue. This approach produces more realistic and diverse conversations that closely mirror authentic human-AI interactions. Our reference-free simulators match or exceed existing methods in quality, while offering a scalable solution for generating high-quality conversational recommendation data without constraining conversations to pre-defined target items. We conduct both quantitative and human evaluations to confirm the effectiveness of our reference-free approach.

Subcellular localization is a crucial biological task for drug target identification and function annotation. Although it has been biologically realized that subcellular localization is closely associated with protein structure, no existing dataset offers comprehensive 3D structural information with detailed subcellular localization annotations, thus severely hindering the application of promising structure-based models on this task. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark called $\mathbf{CAPSUL}$, a $\mathbf{C}$omprehensive hum$\mathbf{A}$n $\mathbf{P}$rotein benchmark for $\mathbf{SU}$bcellular $\mathbf{L}$ocalization. It features a dataset that integrates diverse 3D structural representations with fine-grained subcellular localization annotations carefully curated by domain experts. We evaluate this benchmark using a variety of state-of-the-art sequence-based and structure-based models, showcasing the importance of involving structural features in this task. Furthermore, we explore reweighting and single-label classification strategies to facilitate future investigation on structure-based methods for this task. Lastly, we showcase the powerful interpretability of structure-based methods through a case study on the Golgi apparatus, where we discover a decisive localization pattern $α$-helix from attention mechanisms, demonstrating the potential for bridging the gap with intuitive biological interpretability and paving the way for data-driven discoveries in cell biology.