Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract all sentiment triplets of aspect terms, opinion terms, and sentiment polarities from a sentence. Existing methods are typically trained on individual datasets in isolation, failing to jointly capture the common feature representations shared across domains. Moreover, data privacy constraints prevent centralized data aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose Prototype-based Cross-Domain Span Prototype extraction (PCD-SpanProto), a prototype-regularized federated learning framework to enable distributed clients to exchange class-level prototypes instead of full model parameters. Specifically, we design a weighted performance-aware aggregation strategy and a contrastive regularization module to improve the global prototype under domain heterogeneity and the promotion between intra-class compactness and inter-class separability across clients. Extensive experiments on four ASTE datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines and reduces communication costs, validating the effectiveness of prototype-based cross-domain knowledge transfer.

Composed image retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve a target image that depicts a reference image modified by a textual description. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) achieve promising CIR performance by embedding images and text into a shared space for retrieval, they often fail to reason about what to preserve and what to change. This limitation hinders interpretability and yields suboptimal results, particularly in fine-grained domains like fashion. In this paper, we introduce FIRE-CIR, a model that brings compositional reasoning and interpretability to fashion CIR. Instead of relying solely on embedding similarity, FIRE-CIR performs question-driven visual reasoning: it automatically generates attribute-focused visual questions derived from the modification text, and verifies the corresponding visual evidence in both reference and candidate images. To train such a reasoning system, we automatically construct a large-scale fashion-specific visual question answering dataset, containing questions requiring either single- or dual-image analysis. During retrieval, our model leverages this explicit reasoning to re-rank candidate results, filtering out images inconsistent with the intended modifications. Experimental results on the Fashion IQ benchmark show that FIRE-CIR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in retrieval accuracy. It also provides interpretable, attribute-level insights into retrieval decisions.

We propose a multimodal, physically grounded approach for metric-scale amodal object reconstruction and pose estimation under severe hand occlusion. Unlike prior occlusion-aware 3D generation methods that rely only on vision, we leverage physical interaction signals: proprioception provides the posed hand geometry, and multi-contact touch constrains where the object surface must lie, reducing ambiguity in occluded regions. We represent object structure as a pose-aware, camera-aligned signed distance field (SDF) and learn a compact latent space with a Structure-VAE. In this latent space, we train a conditional flow-matching diffusion model, pretraining on vision-only images and finetuning on occluded manipulation scenes while conditioning on visible RGB evidence, occluder/visibility masks, the hand latent representation, and tactile information. Crucially, we incorporate physics-based objectives and differentiable decoder-guidance during finetuning and inference to reduce hand--object interpenetration and to align the reconstructed surface with contact observations. Because our method produces a metric, physically consistent structure estimate, it integrates naturally into existing two-stage reconstruction pipelines, where a downstream module refines geometry and predicts appearance. Experiments in simulation show that adding proprioception and touch substantially improves completion under occlusion and yields physically plausible reconstructions at correct real-world scale compared to vision-only baselines; we further validate transfer by deploying the model on a real humanoid robot with an end-effector different from those used during training.

Image manipulation localization (IML) and general vision tasks are typically treated as two separate research directions due to the fundamental differences between manipulation-specific and semantic features. In this paper, however, we bridge this gap by introducing a fresh perspective: these two directions are intrinsically connected, and general semantic priors can benefit IML. Building on this insight, we propose a novel trainable adapter (named ReVi) that repurposes existing off-the-shelf general-purpose vision models (e.g., image generation and segmentation networks) for IML. Inspired by robust principal component analysis, the adapter disentangles semantic redundancy from manipulation-specific information embedded in these models and selectively enhances the latter. Unlike existing IML methods that require extensive model redesign and full retraining, our method relies on the off-the-shelf vision models with frozen parameters and only fine-tunes the proposed adapter. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method, showing the potential for scalable IML frameworks.

Abusive speech detection is becoming increasingly important as social media shifts towards voice-based interaction, particularly in multilingual and low-resource settings. Most current systems rely on automatic speech recognition (ASR) followed by text-based hate speech classification, but this pipeline is vulnerable to transcription errors and discards prosodic information carried in speech. We investigate whether Contrastive Language-Audio Pre-training (CLAP) can support abusive speech detection directly from audio. Using the ADIMA dataset, we evaluate CLAP-based representations under few-shot supervised contrastive adaptation in cross-lingual and leave-one-language-out settings, with zero-shot prompting included as an auxiliary analysis. Our results show that CLAP yields strong cross-lingual audio representations across ten Indic languages, and that lightweight projection-only adaptation achieves competitive performance with respect to fully supervised systems trained on complete training data. However, the benefits of few-shot adaptation are language-dependent and not monotonic with shot size. These findings suggest that contrastive audio-text models provide a promising basis for cross-lingual audio abuse detection in low-resource settings, while also indicating that transfer remains incomplete and language-specific in important ways.

The use of synthetic data in machine learning applications and research offers many benefits, including performance improvements through data augmentation, privacy preservation of original samples, and reliable method assessment with fully synthetic data. This work proposes a time-efficient synthetic data generation method based on a fully connected neural network and a randomized loss function that transforms a random Gaussian distribution to approximate a target real-world dataset. The experiments conducted on 25 diverse tabular real-world datasets confirm that the proposed solution surpasses the state-of-the-art generative methods and achieves reference MMD scores orders of magnitude faster than modern deep learning solutions. The experiments involved analyzing distributional similarity, assessing the impact on classification quality, and using PCA for dimensionality reduction, which further enhances data privacy and can boost classification quality while reducing time and memory complexity.

Memory-efficient transfer learning (METL) approaches have recently achieved promising performance in adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. They avoid applying gradient backpropagation in large backbones, thus significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters and high memory consumption during fine-tuning. However, since they typically employ a lightweight and learnable side network, these methods inevitably introduce additional memory and time overhead during inference, which contradicts the ultimate goal of efficient transfer learning. To address the above issue, we propose a novel approach dubbed Masked Dual Path Distillation (MDPD) to accelerate inference while retaining parameter and memory efficiency in fine-tuning with fading side networks. Specifically, MDPD develops a framework that enhances the performance by mutually distilling the frozen backbones and learnable side networks in fine-tuning, and discard the side network during inference without sacrificing accuracy. Moreover, we design a novel feature-based knowledge distillation method for the encoder structure with multiple layers. Extensive experiments on distinct backbones across vision/language-only and vision-and-language tasks demonstrate that our method not only accelerates inference by at least 25.2\% while keeping parameter and memory consumption comparable, but also remarkably promotes the accuracy compared to SOTA approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/Zhang-VKk/MDPD.

Large-scale digital platforms generate billions of timestamped user-item interactions (events) that are crucial for predicting user attributes in, e.g., fraud prevention and recommendations. While self-supervised learning (SSL) effectively models the temporal order of events, it typically overlooks the global structure of the user-item interaction graph. To bridge this gap, we propose three model-agnostic strategies for integrating this structural information into contrastive SSL: enriching event embeddings, aligning client representations with graph embeddings, and adding a structural pretext task. Experiments on four financial and e-commerce datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the accuracy (up to a 2.3% AUC) and reveals that graph density is a key factor in selecting the optimal integration strategy.

Spatial transcriptomics provides a molecularly rich description of tissue organization, enabling unsupervised discovery of tissue niches -- spatially coherent regions of distinct cell-type composition and function that are relevant to both biological research and clinical interpretation. However, spatial transcriptomics remains costly and scarce, while H&E histology is abundant but carries a less granular signal. We propose to leverage paired spatial transcriptomics and H&E data to transfer transcriptomics-derived niche structure to a histology-only model via cross-modal distillation. Across multiple tissue types and disease contexts, the distilled model achieves substantially higher agreement with transcriptomics-derived niche structure than unsupervised morphology-based baselines trained on identical image features, and recovers biologically meaningful neighborhood composition as confirmed by cell-type analysis. The resulting framework leverages paired spatial transcriptomic and H&E data during training, and can then be applied to held-out tissue regions using histology alone, without any transcriptomic input at inference time.

Large language models increasingly operate under multiple instructions from heterogeneous sources with different authority levels, including system policies, user requests, tool outputs, and retrieved context. While prior work on instruction hierarchy highlights the importance of respecting instruction priorities, it mainly focuses on adversarial attacks and overlooks the benign but common instruction conflicts that arise in real-world applications. In such settings, models must not only avoid security violations but also preserve task utility and behavioral consistency when instructions partially or implicitly conflict. We propose Neuro-Symbolic Hierarchical Alignment (NSHA) for hierarchical instruction-following by explicitly modeling and enforcing instruction priorities. At inference time, we introduce solver-guided reasoning that formulates instruction resolution as a constraint satisfaction problem, enabling the model to derive a maximally consistent set of applicable instructions under hierarchical constraints. At training time, NSHA distills solver-based decisions into model parameters using automatically constructed supervision. We evaluate our approach on rule following, task execution, tool use, and safety, covering both single-turn and multi-turn interactions, and show that NSHA significantly improves performance under such conflicts while maintaining competitive utility in reference settings.

Humans effortlessly navigate the physical world by predicting how objects behave under gravity and contact forces, yet how such judgments support sequential physical planning under resource constraints remains poorly understood. Research on intuitive physics debates whether prediction relies on the Intuitive Physics Engine (IPE) or fast, cue-based heuristics; separately, decision-making research debates deliberative lookahead versus myopic strategies. These debates have proceeded in isolation, leaving the cognitive architecture of sequential physical planning underspecified. How physical prediction mechanisms and planning strategies jointly adapt under limited cognitive resources remains an open question. Here we show that humans exhibit a dual transition under resource pressure, simultaneously shifting both physical prediction mechanism and planning strategy to match cognitive budget. Using Overhang Tower, a construction task requiring participants to maximize horizontal overhang while maintaining stability, we find that IPE-based simulation dominates early stages while CNN-based visual heuristics prevail as complexity grows; concurrently, time pressure truncates deliberative lookahead, shifting planning toward shallower horizons: a dual transition unpredicted by prior single-mechanism accounts. These findings reveal a hierarchical, resource-rational architecture that flexibly trades computational cost against predictive fidelity. Our results unify two long-standing debates (simulation vs. heuristics and myopic vs. deliberative planning) as a dynamic repertoire reconfigured by cognitive budget.

Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation (CJPE) aims to predict a judicial decision and provide a legally grounded explanation for a given case based on the facts, legal issues, arguments, cited statutes, and relevant precedents. For such systems to be practically useful in judicial or legal research settings, they must not only achieve high predictive performance but also generate transparent and structured legal reasoning that aligns with established judicial practices. In this work, we present NyayaMind, an open-source framework designed to enable transparent and scalable legal reasoning for the Indian judiciary. The proposed framework integrates retrieval, reasoning, and verification mechanisms to emulate the structured decision-making process typically followed in courts. Specifically, NyayaMind consists of two main components: a Retrieval Module and a Prediction Module. The Retrieval Module employs a RAG pipeline to identify legally relevant statutes and precedent cases from large-scale legal corpora, while the Prediction Module utilizes reasoning-oriented LLMs fine-tuned for the Indian legal domain to generate structured outputs including issues, arguments, rationale, and the final decision. Our extensive results and expert evaluation demonstrate that NyayaMind significantly improves the quality of explanation and evidence alignment compared to existing CJPE approaches, providing a promising step toward trustworthy AI-assisted legal decision support systems.

Data augmentation is a crucial technique for improving model generalization and robustness, particularly in deep learning models where training data is limited. Although many augmentation methods have been developed for time series classification, most are not directly applicable to time series forecasting due to the need to preserve temporal coherence. In this work, we propose Temporal Patch Shuffle (TPS), a simple and model-agnostic data augmentation method for forecasting that extracts overlapping temporal patches, selectively shuffles a subset of patches using variance-based ordering as a conservative heuristic, and reconstructs the sequence by averaging overlapping regions. This design increases sample diversity while preserving forecast-consistent local temporal structure. We extensively evaluate TPS across nine long-term forecasting datasets using five recent model families (TSMixer, DLinear, PatchTST, TiDE, and LightTS), and across four short-term forecasting datasets using PatchTST, observing consistent performance improvements. Comprehensive ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and design rationale of the proposed method.

In partial multi-label learning (PML), each instance is associated with a set of candidate labels containing both ground-truth and noisy labels. The presence of noisy labels disrupts the correspondence between features and labels, degrading classification performance. To address this challenge, we propose a novel PML method based on feature-label modal alignment (PML-MA), which treats features and labels as two complementary modalities and restores their consistency through systematic alignment. Specifically, PML-MA first employs low-rank orthogonal decomposition to generate pseudo-labels that approximate the true label distribution by filtering noisy labels. It then aligns features and pseudo-labels through both global projection into a common subspace and local preservation of neighborhood structures. Finally, a multi-peak class prototype learning mechanism leverages the multi-label nature where instances simultaneously belong to multiple categories, using pseudo-labels as soft membership weights to enhance discriminability. By integrating modal alignment with prototype-guided refinement, PML-MA ensures pseudo-labels better reflect the true distribution while maintaining robustness against label noise. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that PML-MA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior classification accuracy and noise robustness.

Valid segmentation of the optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) from fundus photographs is essential for glaucoma screening. Unfortunately, existing deep learning methods do not guarantee clinical validness including star-convexity and nested structure of OD and OC, resulting corruption in diagnostic metric, especially under cross-dataset domain shift. To adress this issue, this paper proposed NPS-Net (Nested Polar Shape Network), the first framework that formulates the OD/OC segmentation as nested radially monotone polar occupancy estimation.This output representation can guarantee the aforementioned clinical validness and achieve high accuracy. Evaluated across seven public datasets, NPS-Net shows strong zero-shot generalization. On RIM-ONE, it maintains 100% anatomical validity and improves Cup Dice by 12.8% absolute over the best baseline, reducing vCDR MAE by over 56%. On PAPILA, it achieves Disc Dice of 0.9438 and Disc HD95 of 2.78 px, an 83% reduction over the best competing method.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved notable progress in end-to-end autonomous driving by integrating perception, reasoning, and control within a unified multimodal framework. However, they often lack explicit modeling of temporal dynamics and global world consistency, which limits their foresight and safety. In contrast, world models can simulate plausible future scenes but generally struggle to reason about or evaluate the imagined future they generate. In this work, we present VLA-World, a simple yet effective VLA world model that unifies predictive imagination with reflective reasoning to improve driving foresight. VLA-World first uses an action-derived feasible trajectory to guide the generation of the next-frame image, capturing rich spatial and temporal cues that describe how the surrounding environment evolves. The model then reasons over this self-generated future imagined frame to refine the predicted trajectory, achieving higher performance and better interpretability. To support this pipeline, we curate nuScenes-GR-20K, a generative reasoning dataset derived from nuScenes, and employ a three-stage training strategy that includes pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VLA-World consistently surpasses state-of-the-art VLA and world-model baselines on both planning and future-generation benchmarks. Project page: https://vlaworld.github.io

Long-horizon spatiotemporal prediction remains a challenging problem due to cumulative errors, noise amplification, and the lack of physical consistency in existing models. While diffusion models provide a probabilistic framework for modeling uncertainty, conventional approaches often rely on mean squared error objectives and fail to capture the underlying dynamics governed by physical laws. In this work, we propose PDYffusion, a dynamics-informed diffusion framework that integrates PDE-based regularization and uncertainty-aware forecasting for stable long-term prediction. The proposed method consists of two key components: a PDE-regularized interpolator and a UKF-based forecaster. The interpolator incorporates a differential operator to enforce physically consistent intermediate states, while the forecaster leverages the Unscented Kalman Filter to explicitly model uncertainty and mitigate error accumulation during iterative prediction. We provide theoretical analyses showing that the proposed interpolator satisfies PDE-constrained smoothness properties, and that the forecaster converges under the proposed loss formulation. Extensive experiments on multiple dynamical datasets demonstrate that PDYffusion achieves superior performance in terms of CRPS and MSE, while maintaining stable uncertainty behavior measured by SSR. We further analyze the inherent trade-off between prediction accuracy and uncertainty, showing that our method provides a balanced and robust solution for long-horizon forecasting.

Fine-grained action segmentation during renorrhaphy in robot-assisted partial nephrectomy requires frame-level recognition of visually similar suturing gestures with variable duration and substantial class imbalance. The SIA-RAPN benchmark defines this problem on 50 clinical videos acquired with the da Vinci Xi system and annotated with 12 frame-level labels. The benchmark compares four temporal models built on I3D features: MS-TCN++, AsFormer, TUT, and DiffAct. Evaluation uses balanced accuracy, edit score, segmental F1 at overlap thresholds of 10, 25, and 50, frame-wise accuracy, and frame-wise mean average precision. In addition to the primary evaluation across five released split configurations on SIA-RAPN, the benchmark reports cross-domain results on a separate single-port RAPN dataset. Across the strongest reported values over those five runs on the primary dataset, DiffAct achieves the highest F1, frame-wise accuracy, edit score, and frame mAP, while MS-TCN++ attains the highest balanced accuracy.

Dental implant abutments serve as the geometric and biomechanical interface between the implant fixture and the prosthetic crown, yet their design relies heavily on manual effort and is time-consuming. Although deep neural networks have been proposed to assist dentists in designing abutments, most existing approaches remain largely manual or semi-automated, requiring substantial clinician intervention and lacking scalability in multi-abutment scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose TEMAD, a fully automated, text-conditioned multi-expert architecture for multi-abutment design. This framework integrates implant site localization and implant system, compatible abutment parameter regression into a unified pipeline. Specifically, we introduce an Implant Site Identification Network (ISIN) to automatically localize implant sites and provide this information to the subsequent multi-abutment regression network. We further design a Tooth-Conditioned Feature-wise Linear Modulation (TC-FiLM) module, which adaptively calibrates mesh representations using tooth embeddings to enable position-specific feature modulation. Additionally, a System-Prompted Mixture-of-Experts (SPMoE) mechanism leverages implant system prompts to guide expert selection, ensuring system-aware regression. Extensive experiments on a large-scale abutment design dataset show that TEMAD achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods, particularly in multi-abutment settings, validating its effectiveness for fully automated dental implant planning.

Recent works on 3D scene understanding leverage 2D masks from visual foundation models (VFMs) to supervise radiance fields, enabling instance-level 3D segmentation. However, the supervision signals from foundation models are not fundamentally object-centric and often require additional mask pre/post-processing or specialized training and loss design to resolve mask identity conflicts across views. The learned identity of the 3D scene is scene-dependent, limiting generalizability across scenes. Therefore, we propose a dataset-level, object-centric supervision scheme to learn object representations in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Building on a pre-trained slot attention-based Global Object Centric Learning (GOCL) module, we learn a scene-agnostic object codebook that provides consistent, identity-anchored representations across views and scenes. By coupling the codebook with the module's unsupervised object masks, we can directly supervise the identity features of 3D Gaussians without additional mask pre-/post-processing or explicit multi-view alignment. The learned scene-agnostic codebook enables object supervision and identification without per-scene fine-tuning or retraining. Our method thus introduces unsupervised object-centric learning (OCL) into 3DGS, yielding more structured representations and better generalization for downstream tasks such as robotic interaction, scene understanding, and cross-scene generalization.

Robust geo-localization in changing environmental conditions is critical for long-term aerial autonomy. While visual place recognition (VPR) models perform well when airborne views match the training domain, adapting them to shifting distributions during sequential missions triggers catastrophic forgetting. Existing continual learning (CL) methods often fail here because geographic features exhibit severe intra-class variations. In this work, we formulate aerial VPR as a mission-based domain-incremental learning (DIL) problem and propose a novel heterogeneous memory framework. To respect strict onboard storage constraints, our "Learn-and-Dispose" pipeline decouples geographic knowledge into static satellite anchors (preserving global geometric priors) and a dynamic experience replay buffer (retaining domain-specific features). We introduce a spatially-constrained allocation strategy that optimizes buffer selection based on sample difficulty or feature space diversity. To facilitate systematic assessment, we provide three evaluation criteria and a comprehensive benchmark derived from 21 diverse mission sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our architecture significantly boosts spatial generalization; our diversity-driven buffer selection outperforms the random baseline by 7.8% in knowledge retention. Unlike class-mean preservation methods that fail in unstructured environments, maximizing structural diversity achieves a superior plasticity-stability balance and ensures order-agnostic robustness across randomized sequences. These results prove that maintaining structural feature coverage is more critical than sample difficulty for resolving catastrophic forgetting in lifelong aerial autonomy.

Current video benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on event recognition, temporal ordering, and long-context recall, but overlook a harder capability required for expert procedural judgment: tracking how ongoing interactions update the procedural state and thereby determine the correctness of later actions. We introduce SiMing-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating this capability from full-length clinical skill videos. It targets rubric-grounded process-level judgment of whether interaction-driven state updates preserve procedural correctness across an entire workflow. SiMing-Bench is instantiated with SiMing-Score, a physician-annotated dataset of real clinical skill examination videos spanning cardiopulmonary resuscitation, automated external defibrillator operation, and bag-mask ventilation, each paired with a standardized step-wise rubric and dual-expert labels. Across diverse open- and closed-source MLLMs, we observe consistently weak agreement with physician judgments. Moreover, weak performance on rubric-defined intermediate steps persists even when overall procedure-level correlation appears acceptable, suggesting that coarse global assessment substantially overestimates current models' procedural judgment ability. Additional analyses with binary step judgment and step-aligned clips indicate that the bottleneck is not merely fine-grained scoring or temporal localization, but modeling how continuous interactions update procedural state over time.

Scaling Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models requires massive datasets that are both semantically coherent and physically feasible. However, existing scene generation methods often lack context-awareness, making it difficult to synthesize high-fidelity environments embedded with rich semantic information, frequently resulting in unreachable target positions that cause tasks to fail prematurely. We present V-CAGE (Vision-Closed-loop Agentic Generation Engine), an agentic framework for autonomous robotic data synthesis. Unlike traditional scripted pipelines, V-CAGE operates as an embodied agentic system, leveraging foundation models to bridge high-level semantic reasoning with low-level physical interaction. Specifically, we introduce Inpainting-Guided Scene Construction to systematically arrange context-aware layouts, ensuring that the generated scenes are both semantically structured and kinematically reachable. To ensure trajectory correctness, we integrate functional metadata with a Vision-Language Model based closed-loop verification mechanism, acting as a visual critic to rigorously filter out silent failures and sever the error propagation chain. Finally, to overcome the storage bottleneck of massive video datasets, we implement a perceptually-driven compression algorithm that achieves over 90\% filesize reduction without compromising downstream VLA training efficacy. By centralizing semantic layout planning and visual self-verification, V-CAGE automates the end-to-end pipeline, enabling the highly scalable synthesis of diverse, high-quality robotic manipulation datasets.

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) with autoregressive world models suffers from compounding errors, whereas diffusion world models mitigate this by generating trajectory segments jointly. However, existing diffusion guides are either policy-only, discarding value information, or reward-based, which becomes myopic when the diffusion horizon is short. We introduce Advantage-Guided Diffusion for MBRL (AGD-MBRL), which steers the reverse diffusion process using the agent's advantage estimates so that sampling concentrates on trajectories expected to yield higher long-term return beyond the generated window. We develop two guides: (i) Sigmoid Advantage Guidance (SAG) and (ii) Exponential Advantage Guidance (EAG). We prove that a diffusion model guided through SAG or EAG allows us to perform reweighted sampling of trajectories with weights increasing in state-action advantage-implying policy improvement under standard assumptions. Additionally, we show that the trajectories generated from AGD-MBRL follow an improved policy (that is, with higher value) compared to an unguided diffusion model. AGD integrates seamlessly with PolyGRAD-style architectures by guiding the state components while leaving action generation policy-conditioned, and requires no change to the diffusion training objective. On MuJoCo control tasks (HalfCheetah, Hopper, Walker2D and Reacher), AGD-MBRL improves sample efficiency and final return over PolyGRAD, an online Diffuser-style reward guide, and model-free baselines (PPO/TRPO), in some cases by a margin of 2x. These results show that advantage-aware guidance is a simple, effective remedy for short-horizon myopia in diffusion-model MBRL.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the field of natural language processing, but their growing complexity raises concerns about resource usage and transparency. Addressing these challenges, we participated in the NeurIPS LLM Efficiency Challenge, aiming to fine-tune a foundation model within stringent constraints. Our focus was the LLaMa2 70 billion model, optimized on a single A100 40GB GPU within a 24-hour limit. Our methodology hinged on a custom dataset, carefully assembled from diverse open-source resources and benchmark tests, aligned with the challenge's open-source ethos. Our approach leveraged Quantized-Low Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) Fine tuning, integrated with advanced attention mechanisms like Flash Attention 2. We experimented with various configurations of the LoRA technique, optimizing the balance between computational efficiency and model accuracy. Our fine-tuning strategy was underpinned by the creation and iterative testing of multiple dataset compositions, leading to the selection of a version that demonstrated robust performance across diverse tasks and benchmarks. The culmination of our efforts was an efficiently fine-tuned LLaMa2 70B model that operated within the constraints of a single GPU, showcasing not only a significant reduction in resource utilization but also high accuracy across a range of QA benchmarks. Our study serves as a testament to the feasibility of optimizing large-scale models in resource-constrained environments, emphasizing the potential of LLMs in real-world applications.

This paper presents NTIRE 2026, the 3rd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) challenge on multi-exposure image fusion in dynamic scenes. We introduce a benchmark that targets a practical yet difficult HDR imaging setting, where exposure bracketing must be fused under scene motion, illumination variation, and handheld camera jitter. The challenge data contains 100 training sequences with 7 exposure levels and 100 test sequences with 5 exposure levels, reflecting real-world scenarios that frequently cause misalignment and ghosting artefacts. We evaluate submissions with a leaderboard score derived from PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS, while also considering perceptual quality, efficiency, and reproducibility during the final review. This track attracted 114 participating teams and received 987 submissions. The winning methods significantly improved the ability to remove artifacts from multi-exposure fusion and recover fine details. The dataset and the code of each team can be found at the repository: https://github.com/qulishen/RAIM-HDR.

Large language models have been widely explored as decision-support tools in high-stakes domains due to their contextual understanding and reasoning capabilities. However, existing decision-making benchmarks rely on two simplifying assumptions: actions are selected from a finite set of pre-defined candidates, and explicit conditions restricting action feasibility are not incorporated into the decision-making process. These assumptions fail to capture the compositional structure of real-world actions and the explicit conditions that constrain their validity. To address these limitations, we introduce CONDESION-BENCH, a benchmark designed to evaluate conditional decision-making in compositional action space. In CONDESION-BENCH, actions are defined as allocations to decision variables and are restricted by explicit conditions at the variable, contextual, and allocation levels. By employing oracle-based evaluation of both decision quality and condition adherence, we provide a more rigorous assessment of LLMs as decision-support tools.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing Internet-scale image data, offering significant benefits but also raising critical safety and societal concerns. In particular, open-weight MLLMs may be misused to extract sensitive information from personal images at scale, such as identities, locations, or other private details. In this work, we propose ImageProtector, a user-side method that proactively protects images before sharing by embedding a carefully crafted, nearly imperceptible perturbation that acts as a visual prompt injection attack on MLLMs. As a result, when an adversary analyzes a protected image with an MLLM, the MLLM is consistently induced to generate a refusal response such as "I'm sorry, I can't help with that request." We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of ImageProtector across six MLLMs and four datasets. Additionally, we evaluate three potential countermeasures, Gaussian noise, DiffPure, and adversarial training, and show that while they partially mitigate the impact of ImageProtector, they simultaneously degrade model accuracy and/or efficiency. Our study focuses on the practically important setting of open-weight MLLMs and large-scale automated image analysis, and highlights both the promise and the limitations of perturbation-based privacy protection.

Multi-task visual anomaly detection is critical for car-related manufacturing quality assessment. However, existing methods remain task-specific, hindered by the absence of a unified benchmark for multi-task evaluation. To fill in this gap, We present the CAD Dataset, a large-scale and comprehensive benchmark designed for car-related multi-task visual anomaly detection. The dataset contains over 100 images crossing 7 vehicle domains and 3 tasks, providing models a comprehensive view for car-related anomaly detection. It is the first car-related anomaly dataset specialized for multi-task learning(MTL), while combining synthesis data augmentation for few-shot anomaly images. We implement a multi-task baseline and conduct extensive empirical studies. Results show MTL promotes task interaction and knowledge transfer, while also exposing challenging conflicts between tasks. The CAD dataset serves as a standardized platform to drive future advances in car-related multi-task visual anomaly detection.

With the rapid adoption of diffusion models, synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising approach for addressing the growing demand for large-scale image datasets. However, images generated purely by diffusion models often exhibit visual inconsistencies, and training models on such data can create an autophagous feedback loop that leads to model collapse, commonly referred to as Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD). To address these challenges, we propose BlendFusion, a scalable framework for synthetic data generation from 3D scenes using path tracing. Our pipeline incorporates an object-centric camera placement strategy, robust filtering mechanisms, and automatic captioning to produce high-quality image-caption pairs. Using this pipeline, we curate FineBLEND, an image-caption dataset constructed from a diverse set of 3D scenes. We empirically analyze the quality of FineBLEND and compare it to several widely used image-caption datasets. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our object-centric camera placement strategy relative to object-agnostic sampling approaches. Our open-source framework is designed for high configurability, enabling the community to create their own datasets from 3D scenes.