Fresh from the feed

arXiv:2511.11708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Capsule Network (CapsNet) classifier has several advantages over CNNs, including better detection of images containing overlapping categories and higher accuracy on transformed images. Despite the advantages, CapsNet is slow due to its different structure. In addition, CapsNet is resource-hungry, includes many parameters and lags in accuracy compared to CNNs. In this work, we propose LE-CapsNet as a light, enhanced and more accurate variant of CapsNet. Using 3.8M weights, LECapsNet obtains 76.73% accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset while performing inference 4x faster than CapsNet. In addition, our proposed network is more robust at detecting images with affine transformations compared to CapsNet. We achieve 94.3% accuracy on the AffNIST dataset (compared to CapsNet 90.52%).

arXiv:2508.02360v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning Large Language Models on a political topic will significantly manipulate their political stance on various issues and unintentionally affect their stance on unrelated topics. While previous studies have proposed this issue, there is still a lack of understanding regarding the internal representations of these stances and the mechanisms that lead to unintended cross-topic generalization. In this paper, we systematically explore the internal mechanisms underlying this phenomenon from a neuron-level perspective and how to mitigate the cross-topic generalization of political fine-tuning. Firstly, we propose Political Neuron Localization through Activation Contrasting (PNLAC) to identify two distinct types of political neurons: general political neurons, which govern stance across multiple political topics, and topic-specific neurons} that affect the model's political stance on individual topics. We find the existence of these political neuron types across four models and datasets through activation patching experiments. Leveraging these insights, we introduce InhibitFT, an inhibition-based fine-tuning method, effectively mitigating the cross-topic stance generalization. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of identified neuron types across various models and datasets, and show that InhibitFT significantly reduces the cross-topic stance generalization by 20% on average, while preserving topic-specific performance. Moreover, we demonstrate that selectively inhibiting only 5% of neurons is sufficient to effectively mitigate the cross-topic stance generalization.

arXiv:2508.03294v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the difficulty of exam questions is essential for developing good exams, but professors are not always good at this task. We compare various Large Language Model-based methods with three professors in their ability to estimate what percentage of students will give correct answers on True/False exam questions in the areas of Neural Networks and Machine Learning. Our results show that the professors have limited ability to distinguish between easy and difficult questions and that they are outperformed by directly asking Gemini 2.5 to solve this task. Yet, we obtained even better results using uncertainties of the LLMs solving the questions in a supervised learning setting, using only 42 training samples. We conclude that supervised learning using LLM uncertainty can help professors better estimate the difficulty of exam questions, improving the quality of assessment.

arXiv:2508.05337v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent Large Reasoning Language Models (LRLMs) employ long chain-of-thought reasoning with complex reflection behaviors, typically signaled by specific trigger words (e.g., "Wait" and "Alternatively") to enhance performance. However, these reflection behaviors can lead to the overthinking problem where the generation of redundant reasoning steps that unnecessarily increase token usage, raise inference costs, and reduce practical utility. In this paper, we propose Certainty-Guided Reflection Suppression (CGRS), a novel method that mitigates overthinking in LRLMs while maintaining reasoning accuracy. CGRS operates by dynamically suppressing the model's generation of reflection triggers when it exhibits high confidence in its current response, thereby preventing redundant reflection cycles without compromising output quality. Our approach is model-agnostic, requires no retraining or architectural modifications, and can be integrated seamlessly with existing autoregressive generation pipelines. Extensive experiments across four reasoning benchmarks (i.e., AIME24, AMC23, MATH500, and GPQA-D) demonstrate CGRS's effectiveness: it reduces token usage by an average of 18.5% to 41.9% while preserving accuracy. It also achieves the optimal balance between length reduction and performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. These results hold consistently across model architectures (e.g., DeepSeek-R1-Distill series, QwQ-32B, and Qwen3 family) and scales (4B to 32B parameters), highlighting CGRS's practical value for efficient reasoning.

arXiv:2511.11231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-fidelity gaze redirection is critical for generating augmented data to improve the generalization of gaze estimators. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models like GazeGaussian represent the state-of-the-art but can struggle with rendering subtle, continuous gaze shifts. In this paper, we propose DiT-Gaze, a framework that enhances 3D gaze redirection models using a novel combination of Diffusion Transformer (DiT), weak supervision across gaze angles, and an orthogonality constraint loss. DiT allows higher-fidelity image synthesis, while our weak supervision strategy using synthetically generated intermediate gaze angles provides a smooth manifold of gaze directions during training. The orthogonality constraint loss mathematically enforces the disentanglement of internal representations for gaze, head pose, and expression. Comprehensive experiments show that DiT-Gaze sets a new state-of-the-art in both perceptual quality and redirection accuracy, reducing the state-of-the-art gaze error by 4.1% to 6.353 degrees, providing a superior method for creating synthetic training data. Our code and models will be made available for the research community to benchmark against.

arXiv:2511.13121v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconstructing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel views from sparse input views is a highly challenging task. Recent advances in video diffusion models have demonstrated strong temporal reasoning capabilities, making them a promising tool for enhancing reconstruction quality under sparse-view settings. However, existing approaches are primarily designed for modest viewpoint variations, which struggle in capturing fine-grained details in close-up scenarios since input information is severely limited. In this paper, we present a diffusion-based framework, called CloseUpShot, for close-up novel view synthesis from sparse inputs via point-conditioned video diffusion. Specifically, we observe that pixel-warping conditioning suffers from severe sparsity and background leakage in close-up settings. To address this, we propose hierarchical warping and occlusion-aware noise suppression, enhancing the quality and completeness of the conditioning images for the video diffusion model. Furthermore, we introduce global structure guidance, which leverages a dense fused point cloud to provide consistent geometric context to the diffusion process, to compensate for the lack of globally consistent 3D constraints in sparse conditioning inputs. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, especially in close-up novel view synthesis, clearly validating the effectiveness of our design.

arXiv:2511.13125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent learning-based methods have reduced the computational complexity of traditional trajectory similarity computation, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods still fail to leverage the comprehensive spectrum of trajectory information for similarity modeling. To tackle this problem, we propose \textbf{RePo}, a novel method that jointly encodes \textbf{Re}gion-wise and \textbf{Po}int-wise features to capture both spatial context and fine-grained moving patterns. For region-wise representation, the GPS trajectories are first mapped to grid sequences, and spatial context are captured by structural features and semantic context enriched by visual features. For point-wise representation, three lightweight expert networks extract local, correlation, and continuous movement patterns from dense GPS sequences. Then, a router network adaptively fuses the learned point-wise features, which are subsequently combined with region-wise features using cross-attention to produce the final trajectory embedding. To train RePo, we adopt a contrastive loss with hard negative samples to provide similarity ranking supervision. Experiment results show that RePo achieves an average accuracy improvement of 22.2\% over SOTA baselines across all evaluation metrics.

arXiv:2511.13127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Jailbreak attacks can circumvent model safety guardrails and reveal critical blind spots. Prior attacks on text-to-video (T2V) models typically add adversarial perturbations to obviously unsafe prompts, which are often easy to detect and defend. In contrast, we show that benign-looking prompts containing rich, implicit cues can induce T2V models to generate semantically unsafe videos that both violate policy and preserve the original (blocked) intent. To realize this, we propose VEIL, a jailbreak framework that leverages T2V models' cross-modal associative patterns via a modular prompt design. Specifically, our prompts combine three components: neutral scene anchors, which provide the surface-level scene description extracted from the blocked intent to maintain plausibility; latent auditory triggers, textual descriptions of innocuous-sounding audio events (e.g., creaking, muffled noises) that exploit learned audio-visual co-occurrence priors to bias the model toward particular unsafe visual concepts; and stylistic modulators, cinematic directives (e.g., camera framing, atmosphere) that amplify and stabilize the latent trigger's effect. We formalize attack generation as a constrained optimization over the above modular prompt space and solve it with a guided search procedure that balances stealth and effectiveness. Extensive experiments over 7 T2V models demonstrate the efficacy of our attack, achieving a 23 percent improvement in average attack success rate in commercial models.

arXiv:2511.11244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The automatic detection of gaze targets in autistic children through artificial intelligence can be impactful, especially for those who lack access to a sufficient number of professionals to improve their quality of life. This paper introduces a new, real-world AI application for gaze target detection in autistic children, which predicts a child's point of gaze from an activity image. This task is foundational for building automated systems that can measure joint attention-a core challenge in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To facilitate the study of this challenging application, we collected the first-ever Autism Gaze Target (AGT) dataset. We further propose a novel Socially Aware Coarse-to-Fine (SACF) gaze detection framework that explicitly leverages the social context of a scene to overcome the class imbalance common in autism datasets-a consequence of autistic children's tendency to show reduced gaze to faces. It utilizes a two-pathway architecture with expert models specialized in social and non-social gaze, guided by a context-awareness gate module. The results of our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance for gaze target detection in this population, significantly outperforming existing methods, especially on the critical minority class of face-directed gaze.

arXiv:2511.11258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The generation of questions and answers (QA) from knowledge graphs (KG) plays a crucial role in the development and testing of educational platforms, dissemination tools, and large language models (LLM). However, existing approaches often struggle with scalability, linguistic quality, and factual consistency. This paper presents a scalable and deterministic pipeline for generating natural language QA from KGs, with an additional refinement step using LLMs to further enhance linguistic quality. The approach first clusters KG triplets based on their relations, creating reusable templates through natural language rules derived from the entity types of objects and relations. A module then leverages LLMs to refine these templates, improving clarity and coherence while preserving factual accuracy. Finally, the instantiation of answer options is achieved through a selection strategy that introduces distractors from the KG. Our experiments demonstrate that this hybrid approach efficiently generates high-quality QA pairs, combining scalability with fluency and linguistic precision.

arXiv:2511.13132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents have made remarkable progress, but their robustness remains insufficiently studied. Existing adversarial evaluations often rely on perturbations that manifest as unusual textures rarely encountered in everyday indoor environments. Errors under such contrived conditions have limited practical relevance, as real-world agents are unlikely to encounter such artificial patterns. In this work, we focus on indoor lighting, an intrinsic yet largely overlooked scene attribute that strongly influences navigation. We propose Indoor Lighting-based Adversarial Attack (ILA), a black-box framework that manipulates global illumination to disrupt VLN agents. Motivated by typical household lighting usage, we design two attack modes: Static Indoor Lighting-based Attack (SILA), where the lighting intensity remains constant throughout an episode, and Dynamic Indoor Lighting-based Attack (DILA), where lights are switched on or off at critical moments to induce abrupt illumination changes. We evaluate ILA on two state-of-the-art VLN models across three navigation tasks. Results show that ILA significantly increases failure rates while reducing trajectory efficiency, revealing previously unrecognized vulnerabilities of VLN agents to realistic indoor lighting variations.

arXiv:2511.13135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly gain traction in medical applications, clinicians are progressively expecting AI systems not only to generate textual diagnoses but also to produce corresponding medical images that integrate seamlessly into authentic clinical workflows. Despite the growing interest, existing medical visual benchmarks present notable limitations. They often rely on ambiguous queries that lack sufficient relevance to image content, oversimplify complex diagnostic reasoning into closed-ended shortcuts, and adopt a text-centric evaluation paradigm that overlooks the importance of image generation capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce \textsc{MedGEN-Bench}, a comprehensive multimodal benchmark designed to advance medical AI research. MedGEN-Bench comprises 6,422 expert-validated image-text pairs spanning six imaging modalities, 16 clinical tasks, and 28 subtasks. It is structured into three distinct formats: Visual Question Answering, Image Editing, and Contextual Multimodal Generation. What sets MedGEN-Bench apart is its focus on contextually intertwined instructions that necessitate sophisticated cross-modal reasoning and open-ended generative outputs, moving beyond the constraints of multiple-choice formats. To evaluate the performance of existing systems, we employ a novel three-tier assessment framework that integrates pixel-level metrics, semantic text analysis, and expert-guided clinical relevance scoring. Using this framework, we systematically assess 10 compositional frameworks, 3 unified models, and 5 VLMs.

arXiv:2503.07767v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents an approach for improving 2D/3D pelvis registration in optimization-based pose estimators using a learned initialization function. Current methods often fail to converge to the optimal solution when initialized naively. We find that even a coarse initializer greatly improves pose estimator accuracy, and improves overall computational efficiency. This approach proves to be effective also in challenging cases under more extreme pose variation. Experimental validation demonstrates that our method consistently achieves robust and accurate registration, enhancing the reliability of 2D/3D registration for clinical applications.

arXiv:2511.11287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing deployment of autonomous AI agents on the web is hampered by a fundamental misalignment: agents must infer affordances from human-oriented user interfaces, leading to brittle, inefficient, and insecure interactions. To address this, we introduce VOIX, a web-native framework that enables websites to expose reliable, auditable, and privacy-preserving capabilities for AI agents through simple, declarative HTML elements. VOIX introduces and tags, allowing developers to explicitly define available actions and relevant state, thereby creating a clear, machine-readable contract for agent behavior. This approach shifts control to the website developer while preserving user privacy by disconnecting the conversational interactions from the website. We evaluated the framework's practicality, learnability, and expressiveness in a three-day hackathon study with 16 developers. The results demonstrate that participants, regardless of prior experience, were able to rapidly build diverse and functional agent-enabled web applications. Ultimately, this work provides a foundational mechanism for realizing the Agentic Web, enabling a future of seamless and secure human-AI collaboration on the web.

arXiv:2511.11298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models applied in robotics, particularly \textbf{Vision--Language--Action (VLA)} models, hold great promise for achieving general-purpose manipulation. Yet, systematic real-world evaluations and cross-model comparisons remain scarce. This paper reports our \textbf{empirical experiences} from benchmarking four representative VLAs -- \textbf{ACT}, \textbf{OpenVLA--OFT}, \textbf{RDT-1B}, and \boldmath{$\pi_0$} -- across four manipulation tasks conducted in both simulation and on the \textbf{ALOHA Mobile} platform. We establish a \textbf{standardized evaluation framework} that measures performance along three key dimensions: (1) \textit{accuracy and efficiency} (success rate and time-to-success), (2) \textit{adaptability} across in-distribution, spatial out-of-distribution, and instance-plus-spatial out-of-distribution settings, and (3) \textit{language instruction-following accuracy}. Through this process, we observe that \boldmath{$\pi_0$} demonstrates superior adaptability in out-of-distribution scenarios, while \textbf{ACT} provides the highest stability in-distribution. Further analysis highlights differences in computational demands, data-scaling behavior, and recurring failure modes such as near-miss grasps, premature releases, and long-horizon state drift. These findings reveal practical trade-offs among VLA model architectures in balancing precision, generalization, and deployment cost, offering actionable insights for selecting and deploying VLAs in real-world robotic manipulation tasks.

arXiv:2511.11305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce MOON, our comprehensive set of sustainable iterative practices for multimodal representation learning for e-commerce applications. MOON has already been fully deployed across all stages of Taobao search advertising system, including retrieval, relevance, ranking, and so on. The performance gains are particularly significant on click-through rate (CTR) prediction task, which achieves an overall +20.00% online CTR improvement. Over the past three years, this project has delivered the largest improvement on CTR prediction task and undergone five full-scale iterations. Throughout the exploration and iteration of our MOON, we have accumulated valuable insights and practical experience that we believe will benefit the research community. MOON contains a three-stage training paradigm of "Pretraining, Post-training, and Application", allowing effective integration of multimodal representations with downstream tasks. Notably, to bridge the misalignment between the objectives of multimodal representation learning and downstream training, we define the exchange rate to quantify how effectively improvements in an intermediate metric can translate into downstream gains. Through this analysis, we identify the image-based search recall as a critical intermediate metric guiding the optimization of multimodal models. Over three years and five iterations, MOON has evolved along four critical dimensions: data processing, training strategy, model architecture, and downstream application. The lessons and insights gained through the iterative improvements will also be shared. As part of our exploration into scaling effects in the e-commerce field, we further conduct a systematic study of the scaling laws governing multimodal representation learning, examining multiple factors such as the number of training tokens, negative samples, and the length of user behavior sequences.

arXiv:2511.13138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 3D object detection is critical for autonomous driving, yet it remains fundamentally challenging to simultaneously maximize computational efficiency and capture long-range spatial dependencies. We observed that Mamba-based models, with their linear state-space design, capture long-range dependencies at lower cost, offering a promising balance between efficiency and accuracy. However, existing methods rely on axis-aligned scanning within a fixed window, inevitably discarding spatial information. To address this problem, we propose WinMamba, a novel Mamba-based 3D feature-encoding backbone composed of stacked WinMamba blocks. To enhance the backbone with robust multi-scale representation, the WinMamba block incorporates a window-scale-adaptive module that compensates voxel features across varying resolutions during sampling. Meanwhile, to obtain rich contextual cues within the linear state space, we equip the WinMamba layer with a learnable positional encoding and a window-shift strategy. Extensive experiments on the KITTI and Waymo datasets demonstrate that WinMamba significantly outperforms the baseline. Ablation studies further validate the individual contributions of the WSF and AWF modules in improving detection accuracy. The code will be made publicly available.

arXiv:2511.13145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The American Society of Civil Engineers has graded Americas infrastructure condition as a C, with the road system receiving a dismal D. Roads are vital to regional economic viability, yet their management, maintenance, and repair processes remain inefficient, relying on outdated manual or laser-based inspection methods that are both costly and time-consuming. With the increasing availability of real-time visual data from autonomous vehicles, there is an opportunity to apply computer vision (CV) methods for advanced road monitoring, providing insights to guide infrastructure rehabilitation efforts. This project explores the use of state-of-the-art CV techniques for road distress segmentation. It begins by evaluating synthetic data generated with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to assess its usefulness for model training. The study then applies Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for road distress segmentation and subsequently examines the transformer-based model MaskFormer. Results show that GAN-generated data improves model performance and that MaskFormer outperforms the CNN model in two metrics: mAP50 and IoU.

arXiv:2511.11324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digitized histopathology analysis involves complex, time-intensive workflows and specialized expertise, limiting its accessibility. We introduce NOVA, an agentic framework that translates scientific queries into executable analysis pipelines by iteratively generating and running Python code. NOVA integrates 49 domain-specific tools (e.g., nuclei segmentation, whole-slide encoding) built on open-source software, and can also create new tools ad hoc. To evaluate such systems, we present SlideQuest, a 90-question benchmark -- verified by pathologists and biomedical scientists -- spanning data processing, quantitative analysis, and hypothesis testing. Unlike prior biomedical benchmarks focused on knowledge recall or diagnostic QA, SlideQuest demands multi-step reasoning, iterative coding, and computational problem solving. Quantitative evaluation shows NOVA outperforms coding-agent baselines, and a pathologist-verified case study links morphology to prognostically relevant PAM50 subtypes, demonstrating its scalable discovery potential.

arXiv:2511.11340v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The generation of highly fluent text by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses a significant challenge to information integrity and academic research. In this paper, we introduce the Multi-Domain Detection of AI-Generated Text (M-DAIGT) shared task, which focuses on detecting AI-generated text across multiple domains, particularly in news articles and academic writing. M-DAIGT comprises two binary classification subtasks: News Article Detection (NAD) (Subtask 1) and Academic Writing Detection (AWD) (Subtask 2). To support this task, we developed and released a new large-scale benchmark dataset of 30,000 samples, balanced between human-written and AI-generated texts. The AI-generated content was produced using a variety of modern LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, Claude) and diverse prompting strategies. A total of 46 unique teams registered for the shared task, of which four teams submitted final results. All four teams participated in both Subtask 1 and Subtask 2. We describe the methods employed by these participating teams and briefly discuss future directions for M-DAIGT.