Task Scarcity and Label Leakage in Relational Transfer Learning
Comments Accepted at the 3rd DATA-FM Workshop at ICLR 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. OpenReview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=nI2nsMMHXp
Francisco Galuppo Azevedo, Clarissa Lima Loures, Denis Oliveira Correa
Comments Accepted at the 3rd DATA-FM Workshop at ICLR 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. OpenReview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=nI2nsMMHXp
Training relational foundation models requires learning representations that transfer across tasks, yet available supervision is typically limited to a small number of prediction targets per database. This task scarcity causes learned representations to encode task-specific shortcuts that degrade transfer even within the same schema, a problem we call label leakage. We study this using K-Space, a modular architecture combining frozen pretrained tabular encoders with a lightweight message-passing core. To suppress leakage, we introduce a gradient projection method that removes label-predictive directions from representation updates. On RelBench, this improves within-dataset transfer by +0.145 AUROC on average, often recovering near single-task performance. Our results suggest that limited task diversity, not just limited data, constrains relational foundation models.
Yinuo Liu, Zi Qian, Heng Zhou, Jiahao Zhang, Yajie Zhang, Zhihang Li, Mengyu Zhou, Erchao Zhao, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
Interleaved text-and-image generation represents a significant frontier for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), offering a more intuitive way to convey complex information. Current paradigms rely on either image generation or retrieval augmentation, yet they typically treat the two as mutually exclusive paths, failing to unify factuality with creativity. We argue that the next milestone in this field is Agentic Tool Planning, where the model serves as a central controller that autonomously determines when, where, and which tools to invoke to produce interleaved responses for visual-critical queries. To systematically evaluate this paradigm, we introduce ATP-Bench, a novel benchmark comprising 7,702 QA pairs (including 1,592 VQA pairs) across eight categories and 25 visual-critical intents, featuring human-verified queries and ground truths. Furthermore, to evaluate agentic planning independent of end-to-end execution and changing tool backends, we propose a Multi-Agent MLLM-as-a-Judge (MAM) system. MAM evaluates tool-call precision, identifies missed opportunities for tool use, and assesses overall response quality without requiring ground-truth references. Our extensive experiments on 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that models struggle with coherent interleaved planning and exhibit significant variations in tool-use behavior, highlighting substantial room for improvement and providing actionable guidance for advancing interleaved generation. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/ATP-Bench.
Mst. Fahmida Sultana Naznin, Adnan Ibney Faruq, Mushfiqur Rahman, Niloy Kumar Mondal, Md. Mehedi Hasan Shawon, Md Rakibul Hasan
Automated radiology report summarization aims to distill verbose findings into concise clinical impressions, but existing multimodal models often struggle with visual noise and fail to meaningfully improve over strong text-only baselines in the FINDINGS $\to$ IMPRESSION transformation. We challenge two prevailing assumptions: (1) that more visual input is always better, and (2) that multimodal models add limited value when findings already contain rich image-derived detail. Through controlled ablations on MIMIC-CXR benchmark, we show that selectively focusing on pathology-relevant visual patches rather than full images yields substantially better performance. We introduce ViTAS, Visual-Text Attention Summarizer, a multi-stage pipeline that combines ensemble-guided MedSAM2 lung segmentation, bidirectional cross-attention for multi-view fusion, Shapley-guided adaptive patch clustering, and hierarchical visual tokenization feeding a ViT. ViTAS achieves SOTA results with 29.25% BLEU-4 and 69.83% ROUGE-L, improved factual alignment in qualitative analysis, and the highest expert-rated human evaluation scores. Our findings demonstrate that less but more relevant visual input is not only sufficient but superior for multimodal radiology summarization.
Christophe J. MacLellan, Karthik Singaravadivelan, Xin Lian, Zekun Wang, Pat Langley
Comments 6 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables
We present a new theory of categorization based on an information-theoretic rational analysis. To evaluate this theory, we investigate how well it can account for key findings from classic categorization experiments conducted by Hayes-Roth and Hayes-Roth (1977), Medin and Schaffer (1978), and Smith and Minda (1998). We find that it explains the human categorization behavior at least as well (or better) than the independent cue and context models (Medin & Schaffer, 1978), the rational model of categorization (Anderson, 1991), and a hierarchical Dirichlet process model (Griffiths et al., 2007).
Daban Q. Jaff, Mohammad Mohammadamini
FLEURS offers n-way parallel speech for 100+ languages, but Northern Kurdish is not one of them, which limits benchmarking for automatic speech recognition and speech translation tasks in this language. We present FLEURS-Kobani, a Northern Kurdish (ISO 639-3 KMR) spoken extension of the FLEURS benchmark. The FLEURS-Kobani dataset consists of 5,162 validated utterances, totaling 18 hours and 24 minutes. The data were recorded by 31 native speakers. It extends benchmark coverage to an under-resourced Kurdish variety. As baselines, we fine-tuned Whisper v3-large for ASR and E2E S2TT. A two-stage fine-tuning strategy (Common Voice to FLEURS-Kobani) yields the best ASR performance (WER 28.11, CER 9.84 on test). For E2E S2TT (KMR to EN), Whisper achieves 8.68 BLEU on test; we additionally report pivot-derived targets and a cascaded S2TT setup. FLEURS-Kobani provides the first public Northern Kurdish benchmark for evaluation of ASR, S2TT and S2ST tasks. The dataset is publicly released for research use under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Yi Zhang, Zixing Wang, Fulvio Forni
We present a passive, data-driven velocity control method for nonlinear robotic manipulators that achieves better tracking performance than optimized PID with comparable design complexity. Using only three minutes of probing data, a VRFT-based design identifies passive iFIR controllers that (i) preserve closed-loop stability via passivity constraints and (ii) outperform a VRFT-tuned PID baseline on the Franka Research 3 robot in both joint-space and Cartesian-space velocity control, achieving up to a 74.5% reduction in tracking error for the Cartesian velocity tracking experiment with the most demanding reference model. When the robot end-effector dynamics change, the controller can be re-learned from new data, regaining nominal performance. This study bridges learning-based control and stability-guaranteed design: passive iFIR learns from data while retaining passivity-based stability guarantees, unlike many learning-based approaches.
Rui Ai, Yu Pan, David Simchi-Levi, Chonghuan Wang
In user-agent interaction scenarios such as recommendation, brainstorming, and code suggestion, Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate sets of candidate recommendations where the objective is to maximize the collective utility of the entire set rather than individual candidates independently. However, existing reinforcement learning post-training paradigms, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), typically assign the same set-level scalar reward to every candidate in the set. This leads to noisy training signals where poor candidates free-ride on the high reward produced by a single strong peer, resulting in suboptimal exploration. To address this, we propose Shapley-Enhanced GRPO (ShapE-GRPO). By leveraging the permutation-invariant nature of set-level utility, we derive a Shapley-enhanced formulation from cooperative game theory to decompose set-level rewards into granular, candidate-specific signals. We show that our formulation preserves the fundamental axioms of the Shapley value while remaining computationally efficient with polynomial-time complexity. Empirically, ShapE-GRPO consistently outperforms standard GRPO across diverse datasets with accelerated convergence during training.
Benjamin Josef Schüßler, Jakob Prange
Comments accepted to NLP4Ecology workshop at LREC 2026
With the ever-growing urgency of sustainability in the economy and society, and the massive stream of information that comes with it, consumers need reliable access to that information. To address this need, companies began publishing so called Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports, both voluntarily and forced by law. To serve the public, these reports must be addressed not only to financial experts but also to non-expert audiences. But are they written clearly enough? In this work, we extend an existing sentence-level dataset of German ESG reports with crowdsourced readability annotations. We find that, in general, native speakers perceive sentences in ESG reports as easy to read, but also that readability is subjective. We apply various readability scoring methods and evaluate them regarding their prediction error and correlation with human rankings. Our analysis shows that, while LLM prompting has potential for distinguishing clear from hard-to-read sentences, a small finetuned transformer predicts human readability with the lowest error. Averaging predictions of multiple models can slightly improve the performance at the cost of slower inference.
Hadar Mulian, Sergey Zeltyn, Ido Levy, Liane Galanti, Avi Yaeli, Segev Shlomov
We introduce a comprehensive validation framework for LLM-based agentic systems that provides systematic diagnosis and improvement of reliability failures. The framework includes fifteen failure-detection tools and two root-cause analysis modules that jointly uncover weaknesses across input handling, prompt design, and output generation. It integrates lightweight rule-based checks with LLM-as-a-judge assessments to support structured incident detection, classification, and repair. We applied the framework to IBM CUGA, evaluating its performance on the AppWorld and WebArena benchmarks. The analysis revealed recurrent planner misalignments, schema violations, brittle prompt dependencies, and more. Based on these insights, we refined both prompting and coding strategies, maintaining CUGA's benchmark results while enabling mid-sized models such as Llama 4 and Mistral Medium to achieve notable accuracy gains, substantially narrowing the gap with frontier models. Beyond quantitative validation, we conducted an exploratory study that fed the framework's diagnostic outputs and agent description into an LLM for self-reflection and prioritization. This interactive analysis produced actionable insights on recurring failure patterns and focus areas for improvement, demonstrating how validation itself can evolve into an agentic, dialogue-driven process. These results show a path toward scalable, quality assurance, and adaptive validation in production agentic systems, offering a foundation for more robust, interpretable, and self-improving agentic architectures.
Adar Avsian, Larry Heck
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent settings where communication must balance informativeness and secrecy. In such settings, an agent may need to signal information to collaborators while preventing an adversary from inferring sensitive details. However, existing LLM benchmarks primarily evaluate capabilities such as reasoning, factual knowledge, or instruction following, and do not directly measure strategic communication under asymmetric information. We introduce SNEAK (Secret-aware Natural language Evaluation for Adversarial Knowledge), a benchmark for evaluating selective information sharing in language models. In SNEAK, a model is given a semantic category, a candidate set of words, and a secret word, and must generate a message that indicates knowledge of the secret without revealing it too clearly. We evaluate generated messages using two simulated agents with different information states: an ally, who knows the secret and must identify the intended message, and a chameleon, who does not know the secret and attempts to infer it from the message. This yields two complementary metrics: utility, measuring how well the message communicates to collaborators, and leakage, measuring how much information it reveals to an adversary. Using this framework, we analyze the trade-off between informativeness and secrecy in modern language models and show that strategic communication under asymmetric information remains a challenging capability for current systems. Notably, human participants outperform all evaluated models by a large margin, achieving up to four times higher scores.
Minyoung E. Kim, Dae Hee Yun, Aditi V. Patel, Madeline Hon, Webster Guan, Taegeon Lee, Brian Nguyen
Comments 21 pages, 12 figures. Accepted at CVPR 2026
Unprecedented visual details of biological structures are being revealed by subcellular-resolution whole-brain 3D microscopy data, enabled by recent advances in intact tissue processing and light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM). These volumetric data offer rich morphological and spatial cellular information, however, the lack of scalable data processing and analysis methods tailored to these petabyte-scale data poses a substantial challenge for accurate interpretation. Further, existing models for visual tasks such as object detection and classification struggle to generalize to this type of data. To accelerate the development of suitable methods and foundational models, we present CANVAS, a comprehensive set of high-resolution whole mouse brain LSFM benchmark data, encompassing six neuronal and immune cell-type markers, along with cell annotations and a leaderboard. We also demonstrate challenges in generalization of baseline models built on existing architectures, especially due to the heterogeneity in cellular morphology across phenotypes and anatomical locations in the brain. To the best of our knowledge, CANVAS is the first and largest LSFM benchmark that captures intact mouse brain tissue at subcellular level, and includes extensive annotations of cells throughout the brain.
Yan Lin, Jilin Hu, Shengnan Guo, Christian S. Jensen, Youfang Lin, Huaiyu Wan
Microscopic road-network weights represent fine-grained, time-varying traffic conditions obtained from individual vehicles. An example is travel speeds associated with road segments as vehicles traverse them. These weights support tasks including traffic microsimulation and vehicle routing with reliability guarantees. We study the problem of time-varying microscopic weight completion. During a time slot, the available weights typically cover only some road segments. Weight completion recovers distributions for the weights of every road segment at the current time slot. This problem involves two challenges: (i) contending with two layers of sparsity, where weights are missing at both the network layer (many road segments lack weights) and the segment layer (a segment may have insufficient weights to enable accurate distribution estimation); and (ii) achieving a weight distribution representation that is closed-form and can capture complex conditions flexibly, including heavy tails and multiple clusters. To address these challenges, we propose DiSGMM that combines sparsity-aware embeddings with spatiotemporal modeling to leverage sparse known weights alongside learned segment properties and long-range correlations for distribution estimation. DiSGMM represents distributions of microscopic weights as learnable Gaussian mixture models, providing closed-form distributions capable of capturing complex conditions flexibly. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that DiSGMM can outperform state-of-the-art methods.
Gaurab Baral, Junxiu Zhou
Comments 9 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables
Automated processing of structured documents such as government forms, healthcare records, and enterprise invoices remains a persistent challenge due to the high degree of layout variability encountered in real-world settings. This paper introduces AutoFormBench, a benchmark dataset of 407 annotated real-world forms spanning government, healthcare, and enterprise domains, designed to train and evaluate form element detection models. We present a systematic comparison of classical OpenCV approaches and four YOLO architectures (YOLOv8, YOLOv11, YOLOv26-s, and YOLOv26-l) for localizing and classifying fillable form elements. specifically checkboxes, input lines, and text boxes across diverse PDF document types. YOLOv11 demonstrates consistently superior performance in both F1 score and Jaccard accuracy across all element classes and tolerance levels.
Han Deng, Anqi Zou, Hanling Zhang, Ben Fei, Chengyu Zhang, Haobo Wang, Xinru Guo, Zhenyu Li, Xuzhu Wang, Peng Yang, Fujian Zhang, Weiyu Guo, Xiaohong Shao, Zhaoyang Liu, Shixiang Tang, Zhihui Wang, Wanli Ouyang
Comments 17 pages
Scientific discovery increasingly depends on high-throughput characterization, yet automation is hindered by proprietary GUIs and the limited generalizability of existing API-based systems. We present Owl-AuraID, a software-hardware collaborative embodied agent system that adopts a GUI-native paradigm to operate instruments through the same interfaces as human experts. Its skill-centric framework integrates Type-1 (GUI operation) and Type-2 (data analysis) skills into end-to-end workflows, connecting physical sample handling with scientific interpretation. Owl-AuraID demonstrates broad coverage across ten categories of precision instruments and diverse workflows, including multimodal spectral analysis, microscopic imaging, and crystallographic analysis, supporting modalities such as FTIR, NMR, AFM, and TGA. Overall, Owl-AuraID provides a practical, extensible foundation for autonomous laboratories and illustrates a path toward evolving laboratory intelligence through reusable operational and analytical skills. The code are available at https://github.com/OpenOwlab/AuraID.
Mingyeong Song, Seoyeon Ko, Junhyug Noh
Comments 5 pages, 1 figure, to appear in ICASSP 2026
Binaural audio delivers spatial cues essential for immersion, yet most consumer videos are monaural due to capture constraints. We introduce SIREN, a visually guided mono to binaural framework that explicitly predicts left and right channels. A ViT-based encoder learns dual-head self-attention to produce a shared scene map and end-to-end L/R attention, replacing hand-crafted masks. A soft, annealed spatial prior gently biases early L/R grounding, and a two-stage, confidence-weighted waveform-domain fusion (guided by mono reconstruction and interaural phase consistency) suppresses crosstalk when aggregating multi-crop and overlapping windows. Evaluated on FAIR-Play and MUSIC-Stereo, SIREN yields consistent gains on time-frequency and phase-sensitive metrics with competitive SNR. The design is modular and generic, requires no task-specific annotations, and integrates with standard audio-visual pipelines.
Brahim Erraji, Michaël Perrot, Aurélien Bellet
Comments 9 Pages, Published to AISTATS 2026
While clients may join federated learning to improve performance on data they rarely observe locally, they often remain self-interested, expecting the global model to perform well on their own data. This motivates an objective that ensures all clients achieve a similar loss gap -the difference in performance between the global model and the best model they could train using only their local data-. To this end, we propose EAGLE, a novel federated learning algorithm that explicitly regularizes the global model to minimize disparities in loss gaps across clients. Our approach is particularly effective in heterogeneous settings, where the optimal local models of the clients may be misaligned. Unlike existing methods that encourage loss parity, potentially degrading performance for many clients, EAGLE targets fairness in relative improvements. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for EAGLE under non-convex loss functions, and characterize how its iterates perform relative to the standard federated learning objective using a novel heterogeneity measure. Empirically, we demonstrate that EAGLE reduces the disparity in loss gaps among clients by prioritizing those furthest from their local optimal loss, while maintaining competitive utility in both convex and non-convex cases compared to strong baselines.
Yan Lin, Jonas A. Finkler, Tao Du, Jilin Hu, Morten M. Smedskjaer
Amorphous materials are solids that lack long-range atomic order but possess complex short- and medium-range order. Unlike crystalline materials that can be described by unit cells containing few up to hundreds of atoms, amorphous materials require larger simulation cells with at least hundreds or often thousands of atoms. Inverse design of amorphous materials with probabilistic generative models aims to generate the atomic positions and elements of amorphous materials given a set of desired properties. It has emerged as a promising approach for facilitating the application of amorphous materials in domains such as energy storage and thermal management. In this paper, we introduce AMShortcut, an inference- and training-efficient probabilistic generative model for amorphous materials. AMShortcut enables accurate inference of diverse short- and medium-range structures in amorphous materials with only a few sampling steps, mitigating the need for an excessive number of sampling steps that hinders inference efficiency. AMShortcut can be trained once with all relevant properties and perform inference conditioned on arbitrary combinations of desired properties, mitigating the need for training one model for each combination. Experiments on three amorphous materials datasets with diverse structures and properties demonstrate that AMShortcut achieves its design goals.
Mustafa Mete, Anastasia Bolotnikova, Alexander Schuessler, Jamie Paik
Wearable robots aim to seamlessly adapt to humans and their environment with personalized interactions. Existing supernumerary robotic limbs (SRLs), which enhance the physical capabilities of humans with additional extremities, have thus far been developed primarily for task-specific applications in structured industrial settings, limiting their adaptability to dynamic and unstructured environments. Here, we introduce a novel reconfigurable SRL framework grounded in a quantitative analysis of human augmentation to guide the development of more adaptable SRLs for diverse scenarios. This framework captures how SRL configuration shapes workspace extension and human-robot collaboration. We define human augmentation ratios to evaluate collaborative, visible extended, and non-visible extended workspaces, enabling systematic selection of SRL placement, morphology, and autonomy for a given task. Using these metrics, we demonstrate how quantitative augmentation analysis can guide the reconfiguration and control of SRLs to better match task requirements. We validate the proposed approach through experiments with a reconfigurable SRL composed of origami-inspired modular elements. Our results suggest that reconfigurable SRLs, informed by quantitative human augmentation analysis, offer a new perspective for providing adaptable human augmentation and assistance in everyday environments.
Cristian Santini, Sebastian Barzaghi, Paolo Sernani, Emanuele Frontoni, Laura Melosi, Mehwish Alam
This paper introduces ENEIDE (Extracting Named Entities from Italian Digital Editions), a silver standard dataset for Named Entity Recognition and Linking (NERL) in historical Italian texts. The corpus comprises 2,111 documents with over 8,000 entity annotations semi-automatically extracted from two scholarly digital editions: Digital Zibaldone, the philosophical diary of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837), and Aldo Moro Digitale, the complete works of the Italian politician Aldo Moro (1916--1978). Annotations cover multiple entity types (person, location, organization, literary work) linked to Wikidata identifiers, including NIL entities that cannot be mapped to the knowledge graph. To the best of our knowledge, ENEIDE represents the first multi-domain, publicly available NERL dataset for historical Italian with training, development, and test splits. We present a methodology for semi-automatic annotations extraction from manually curated scholarly digital editions, including quality control and annotation enhancement procedures. Baseline experiments using state-of-the-art models demonstrate the dataset's challenge for NERL and the gap between zero-shot approaches and fine-tuned models. The dataset's diachronic coverage spanning two centuries makes it particularly suitable for temporal entity disambiguation and cross-domain evaluation. ENEIDE is released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Léopold Maillard, Francis Engelmann, Tom Durand, Boxiao Pan, Yang You, Or Litany, Leonidas Guibas, Maks Ovsjanikov
Comments Project page: https://sceneteract.github.io/
Embodied AI depends on interactive 3D environments that support meaningful activities for diverse users, yet assessing their functional affordances remains a core challenge. We introduce SceneTeract, a framework that verifies 3D scene functionality under agent-specific constraints. Our core contribution is a grounded verification engine that couples high-level semantic reasoning with low-level geometric checks. SceneTeract decomposes complex activities into sequences of atomic actions and validates each step against accessibility requirements (e.g., reachability, clearance, and navigability) conditioned on an embodied agent profile, using explicit physical and geometric simulations. We deploy SceneTeract to perform an in-depth evaluation of (i) synthetic indoor environments, uncovering frequent functional failures that prevent basic interactions, and (ii) the ability of frontier Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about and predict functional affordances, revealing systematic mismatches between semantic confidence and physical feasibility even for the strongest current models. Finally, we leverage SceneTeract as a reward engine for VLM post-training, enabling scalable distillation of geometric constraints into reasoning models. We release the SceneTeract verification suite and data to bridge perception and physical reality in embodied 3D scene understanding.
Franco Rugolon, Korbinian Randl, Braslav Jovanovic, Ioanna Miliou, Panagiotis Papapetrou
Multimodal Machine Learning offers a holistic view of a patient's status, integrating structured and unstructured data from electronic health records (EHR). We propose a framework to predict metastasis risk one month prior to diagnosis, using six months of clinical history from EHR data. Data from four cancer cohorts collected at Karolinska University Hospital (Stockholm, Sweden) were analyzed: breast (n = 743), colon (n = 387), lung (n = 870), and prostate (n = 1890). The dataset included demographics, comorbidities, laboratory results, medications, and clinical text. We compared traditional and deep learning classifiers across single modalities and multimodal combinations, using various fusion strategies and a Transparent Reporting of a multivariable prediction model for Individual Prognosis Or Diagnosis (TRIPOD) 2a design, with an 80-20 development-validation split to ensure a rigorous, repeatable evaluation. Performance was evaluated using AUROC, AUPRC, F1 score, sensitivity, and specificity. We then employed a multimodal adaptation of SHAP to analyze the classifiers' reasoning. Intermediate fusion achieved the highest F1 scores on breast (0.845), colon (0.786), and prostate cancer (0.845), demonstrating strong predictive performance. For lung cancer, the intermediate fusion achieved an F1 score of 0.819, while the text-only model achieved the highest, with an F1 score of 0.829. Deep learning classifiers consistently outperformed traditional models. Colon cancer, the smallest cohort, had the lowest performance, highlighting the importance of sufficient training data. SHAP analysis showed that the relative importance of modalities varied across cancer types. Fusion strategies offer distinct strengths and weaknesses. Intermediate fusion consistently delivered the best results, but strategy choices should align with data characteristics and organizational needs.
Tim R. Davidson, Benoit Seguin, Enrico Bacis, Cesar Ilharco, Hamza Harkous
Comments Accepted to TMLR 2026, J2C Certification
Although many AI applications of interest require specialized multi-modal models, relevant data to train such models is inherently scarce or inaccessible. Filling these gaps with human annotators is prohibitively expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming, leading model builders to increasingly consider synthetic data as a scalable alternative. However, existing synthetic data generation methods often rely on manual prompts, evolutionary algorithms, or extensive seed data from the target distribution - limiting their scalability, explainability, and control. In this paper, we introduce Simula: a novel reasoning-driven framework for data generation and evaluation. It employs a seedless, agentic approach to generate synthetic datasets at scale, allowing users to define desired dataset characteristics through an explainable and controllable process that enables fine-grained resource allocation. We show the efficacy of our approach on a variety of datasets, rigorously testing both intrinsic and downstream properties. Our work (1) offers guidelines for synthetic data mechanism design, (2) provides insights into generating and evaluating synthetic data at scale, and (3) unlocks new opportunities for developing and deploying AI in domains where data scarcity or privacy concerns are paramount.
Abderrezzaq Sendjasni, Mohamed-Chaker Larabi
Comments This work has been submitted to IEEE Transactions for possible publication
The rapid evolution of Generative AI (GenAI) models has led to synthetic images of unprecedented realism, challenging traditional methods for distinguishing them from natural photographs. While existing detectors often rely on single-feature spaces, such as statistical regularities, semantic embeddings, or texture patterns, these approaches tend to lack robustness when confronted with diverse and evolving generative models. In this work, we investigate and systematically evaluate a multi-feature fusion framework that combines complementary cues from three distinct spaces: (1) Mean Subtracted Contrast Normalized (MSCN) features capturing low-level statistical deviations; (2) CLIP embeddings encoding high-level semantic coherence; and (3) Multi-scale Local Binary Patterns (MLBP) characterizing mid-level texture anomalies. Through extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets covering a wide range of generative models, we show that individual feature spaces exhibit significant performance variability across different generators. Crucially, the fusion of all three representations yields superior and more consistent performance, particularly in a challenging mixed-model scenario. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, the proposed framework yields consistently improved performance across all evaluated datasets. Overall, this work highlights the importance of hybrid representations for robust GenAI image detection and provides a principled framework for integrating complementary visual cues.
Boshko Koloski, Marjan Stoimchev, Jurica Levatić, Dragi Kocev, Sašo Džeroski
Comments REO: Advances in Representation Learning for Earth Observation, accepted workshow paper at EurIPS
Hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) is essential for modeling structured label dependencies in remote sensing. Yet existing approaches struggle in multi-path settings, where images may activate multiple taxonomic branches, leading to underuse of hierarchical information. We propose MAPLE (Multi-Path Adaptive Propagation with Level-Aware Embeddings), a framework that integrates (i) hierarchical semantic initialization from graph-aware textual descriptions, (ii) graph-based structure encoding via graph convolutional networks (GCNs), and (iii) adaptive multi-modal fusion that dynamically balances semantic priors and visual evidence. An adaptive level-aware objective automatically selects appropriate losses per hierarchy level. Evaluations on CORINE-aligned remote sensing datasets (AID, DFC-15, and MLRSNet) show consistent improvements of up to +42% in few-shot regimes while adding only 2.6% parameter overhead, demonstrating that MAPLE effectively and efficiently models hierarchical semantics for Earth observation (EO).
Ganen Sethupathy, Lalit Dumka, Jan Schagen
Comments Preprint version of a manuscript currently under review at IEEE Access
Public spaces such as transport hubs, city centres, and event venues require timely and reliable detection of potentially violent behaviour to support public safety. While automated video analysis has made significant progress, practical deployment remains constrained by latency, privacy, and resource limitations, particularly under edge-computing conditions. This paper presents the design and demonstrator-based deployment of a hybrid edge-based action detection system that combines skeleton-based motion analysis with vision-language models for semantic scene interpretation. Skeleton-based processing enables continuous, privacy-aware monitoring with low computational overhead, while vision-language models provide contextual understanding and zero-shot reasoning capabilities for complex and previously unseen situations. Rather than proposing new recognition models, the contribution focuses on a system-level comparison of both paradigms under realistic edge constraints. The system is implemented on a GPU-enabled edge device and evaluated with respect to latency, resource usage, and operational trade-offs using a demonstrator-based setup. The results highlight the complementary strengths and limitations of motioncentric and semantic approaches and motivate a hybrid architecture that selectively augments fast skeletonbased detection with higher-level semantic reasoning. The presented system provides a practical foundation for privacy-aware, real-time video analysis in public safety applications.
Jing-Xiao Liao, Haoran Wang, Tao Li, Daoming Lyu, Yi Zhang, Chengjun Cai, Feng-Lei Fan
With the development of foundational models, model compression has become a critical requirement. Various model compression approaches have been proposed such as low-rank decomposition, pruning, quantization, ergodic dynamic systems, and knowledge distillation, which are based on different heuristics. To elevate the field from fragmentation to a principled discipline, we construct a unifying mathematical framework for model compression grounded in measure theory. We further demonstrate that each model compression technique is mathematically equivalent to a neural network subject to a regularization. Building upon this mathematical and structural equivalence, we propose an experimentally-verified data-free model compression framework, termed \textit{Big2Small}, which translates Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) from data domain to the domain of network parameters. \textit{Big2Small} trains compact INRs to encode the weights of larger models and reconstruct the weights during inference. To enhance reconstruction fidelity, we introduce Outlier-Aware Preprocessing to handle extreme weight values and a Frequency-Aware Loss function to preserve high-frequency details. Experiments on image classification and segmentation demonstrate that \textit{Big2Small} achieves competitive accuracy and compression ratios compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Eros Fanì, Oğuzhan Ersoy
Comments Accepted at the ICLR 2026 Workshop on Scaling Post-training for LLMs
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of specialized tasks, exhibiting strong problem-solving capabilities. However, training these models is prohibitively expensive, and they often lack domain-specific expertise because they rely on general knowledge datasets. Expertise finetuning can address this issue; however, it often leads to overspecialization, and developing a single multi-domain expert remains difficult due to diverging objectives. Furthermore, multitask training is challenging due to interference and catastrophic forgetting. Existing work proposes combining the expertise of dense models within a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, although this approach still requires multitask finetuning. To address these issues, we introduce Dynamic Upcycling MoE (DUME), a novel approach that reuses dense experts trained on different domains to construct a unified MoE model. Our method builds a single multitask model that preserves the capabilities of the original dense experts without requiring additional training. DUME is both cost-efficient and scalable: by leveraging the closed-form solution of ridge regression, it eliminates the need for further optimization and enables experts to be added dynamically while maintaining the model's original performance. We demonstrate that DUME consistently outperforms baseline approaches in both causal language modeling and reasoning settings. Finally, we also show that the DUME model can be fine-tuned to further improve performance. We show that, in the causal language modeling setting, DUME can retain up to 97.6% of a dense expert model specialized in one particular domain, and that it can also surpass it in the reasoning setting, where it can achieve 102.1% of the dense expert performance. Our code is available at: github.com/gensyn-ai/dume.
Quanhao Li, Wei Jiang
A human-like chess engine should mimic the style, errors, and consistency of a strong human player rather than maximize playing strength. We show that training from move sequences alone forces a model to learn two capabilities: state tracking, which reconstructs the board from move history, and decision quality, which selects good moves from that reconstructed state. These impose contradictory data requirements: low-rated games provide the diversity needed for tracking, while high-rated games provide the quality signal for decision learning. Removing low-rated data degrades performance. We formalize this tension as a dual-capability bottleneck, P <= min(T,Q), where overall performance is limited by the weaker capability. Guided by this view, we scale the model from 28M to 120M parameters to improve tracking, then introduce Elo-weighted training to improve decisions while preserving diversity. A 2 x 2 factorial ablation shows that scaling improves tracking, weighting improves decisions, and their combination is superadditive. Linear weighting works best, while overly aggressive weighting harms tracking despite lower validation loss. We also introduce a coverage-decay formula, t* = log(N/kcrit)/log b, as a reliability horizon for intra-game degeneration risk. Our final 120M-parameter model, without search, reached Lichess bullet 2570 over 253 rated games. On human move prediction it achieves 55.2% Top-1 accuracy, exceeding Maia-2 rapid and Maia-2 blitz. Unlike position-based methods, sequence input naturally encodes full game history, enabling history-dependent decisions that single-position models cannot exhibit.
Qiucheng Yu, Ruijie Xu, Mingang Chen, Xuequan Lu, Jianfeng Dong, Chaochao Lu, Xin Tan
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have accelerated their application to indoor safety hazards assessment. However, existing benchmarks suffer from three fundamental limitations: (1) heavy reliance on synthetic datasets constructed via simulation software, creating a significant domain gap with real-world environments; (2) oversimplified safety tasks with artificial constraints on hazard and scene types, thereby limiting model generalization; and (3) absence of rigorous evaluation protocols to thoroughly assess model capabilities in complex home safety scenarios. To address these challenges, we introduce TSHA (\textbf{T}rustworthy \textbf{S}afety \textbf{H}azards \textbf{A}ssessment), a comprehensive benchmark comprising 81,809 carefully curated training samples drawn from four complementary sources: existing indoor datasets, internet images, AIGC images, and newly captured images. This benchmark set also includes a highly challenging test set with 1707 samples, comprising not only a carefully selected subset from the training distribution but also newly added videos and panoramic images containing multiple safety hazards, used to evaluate the model's robustness in complex safety scenarios. Extensive experiments on 23 popular VLMs demonstrate that current VLMs lack robust capabilities for safety hazard assessment. Importantly, models trained on the TSHA training set not only achieve a significant performance improvement of up to +18.3 points on the TSHA test set but also exhibit enhanced generalizability across other benchmarks, underscoring the substantial contribution and importance of the TSHA benchmark.
Prasanjit Dey, Soumyabrata Dev, Bianca Schoen-Phelan
Comments This manuscript is currently under review at IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
We address the challenge of adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for multivariate time-series analysis, where their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational and memory demands. Our solution, One-for-All, introduces Gaussian Rank-Stabilized Low-Rank Adapters (rsLoRA) to enable parameter-efficient fine-tuning of frozen LLMs. While inspired by LoRA, rsLoRA introduces a mathematically grounded rank-stabilization mechanism that enables provable gradient stability at low ranks a novel contribution absent in prior PEFT methods. Our framework injects trainable rank decomposition matrices (rank 16) into positional embeddings and output layers, while keeping self-attention weights fixed. This design reduces trainable parameters by 6.8$\times$ (vs. TimesNet), 21$\times$ (vs. GPT4TS), and 11.8$\times$ (vs. TIME-LLM), while achieving a 168-1,776$\times$ smaller memory footprint (2.2MiB vs. 340MiB-4.18GiB in SOTA models). Rigorous evaluation across six time-series tasks demonstrates that One-for-All achieves state-of-the-art efficiency-accuracy trade-offs: 5.5$\times$ higher parameter efficiency (MSE=5.50) than TimesNet and 21$\times$ better than GPT4TS, while matching their forecasting accuracy (MSE=0.33). The framework's stability is validated through consistent performance across diverse horizons (96-720 steps) and datasets (ETT, Weather, M3, M4), with 98.3% fewer parameters than conventional transformers. These advances enable deployment on edge devices for healthcare, finance, and environmental monitoring without compromising performance.
扫码添加微信好友,提出您的宝贵建议 👇
💡 备注请填写:网站反馈