Computer Vision
AvatarDynamizer: From Static to Dynamic Human Avatars via Generative Dynamic Textures
Guoxing Sun, Heming Zhu, Linjie Lyu et al. (+3 more)
For full-body avatars, modeling surface dynamics is crucial for overcoming the uncanny valley and achieving perceptual realism. Person-agnostic methods recover static 3D avatars from
monocular images,
videos, or text
prompts, but their skeleton-driven animations lack realistic surface dynamics such as clothing wrinkles. In contrast, person-specific methods achieve high-quality rendering and realistic dynamics, but require expensive multi-view captures for each individual. Recent generalizable dynamic avatar methods struggle to embed surface dynamics, leading to either limited multi-view consistency or dynamic expressiveness. To this end, we propose AvatarDynamizer, a generative method that transforms an off-the-shelf static 3D avatar into a controllable, realistic, and multi-view-consistent 4D avatar. We introduce a novel texture-space surface-dynamics
embedding and formulate avatar dynamics modeling as conditional texture generation. Our encoder–decoder representation embeds pose-dependent dynamics into dynamic texture maps, enabling compatibility with pre-trained
video diffusion models while decoding them into 3D Gaussians for multi-view consistent rendering. Since existing
datasets are limited in scale, sequence length, or motion diversity, we collect a large-scale multi-view
dataset with long sequences covering diverse skeletal motions and surface dynamics. Experiments show that our method effectively animates static avatars with faithful surface dynamics and outperforms competing generalizable methods in visual fidelity, especially under limited dynamic training data.
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All authors Guoxing Sun, Heming Zhu, Linjie Lyu, Pascal Fua, Christian Theobalt, Marc Habermann
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.ao-ph
The impact of feature engineering and an optimisation framework for ocean colour machine learning
Edson Silva, Julien Brajard, Simon Cappe et al. (+2 more)
Machine learning (ML) is widely used for the development of ocean colour
algorithms, but most studies focus on model parameter training and hyperparameter tuning. The optimisation of the data that feeds the models - i.e., Feature Engineering (FE) - is not fully explored. We assess the impact of FE in ocean colour machine learning models and we propose an optimisation framework that includes seven sequenced levels of data transformation: i. band choice, ii. log scaling, iii. spectral shape normalisation, iv. index extraction, v. principal component analysis, vi. feature scaling, and vii. zero-to-one scaling. We demonstrate the application for Multi-layer perceptron, Support Vector Machines, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting Trees on Sentinel-3 OLCI observations in the Norwegian coastal waters. The models are trained to estimate Chlorophyll-a concentration [Chl-a] and Secchi disk depth (Zsd). Results show that accuracy is highly variable among FE found in six studies using Sentinel-3 OLCI and the ones that we optimise. The R range from 0.01 to 0.55 for [Chl-a] and from 0.15 to 0.68 for Zsd, where the optimised FE shows the top results. The ML models with optimised FE could also improve by two times the R and reduce up to 63% of the mean absolute error when compared to CHL_OC4ME and CHL_NN standard
algorithms. Nevertheless, no common optimised FE is found for all target variables and ML models, suggesting that FE optimisation is necessary for each application. Therefore, our proposed framework can be key for improving the accuracy of water quality monitoring in coastal waters.
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All authors Edson Silva, Julien Brajard, Simon Cappe, Lasse H. Pettersson, François Counillon
Systems and Control
Fixed-structure Gaussian Mixture Filtering with Robust Measurement Updates under Outliers
Ondřej Straka and Uwe D. Hanebeck
Bayesian state estimation for discrete-time nonlinear
stochastic systems is considered in the presence of measurement outliers. Building on a fixed-structure Gaussian mixture filtering framework, this paper proposes a robust measurement-update variant in which the predictive density structure is determined by an offline decomposition of the transition density into axis-aligned Gaussian components. This construction maintains the Gaussian mixture structure as deterministic and tunable via the chosen decomposition fidelity. Measurement components affected by outliers are modeled using a Student's-t distribution, and the corresponding update of each Gaussian mixture component is approximated by a variational Bayes procedure. The resulting filter is evaluated in a three-dimensional tracking scenario with range and bearing measurements, where the bearing channel is affected by outliers, modeled as heavy-tailed noise.
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Computer Vision
Unified and Efficient Point-Line Local Features
François Costa, Raphael Kreft, Eckhard Goedeke et al. (+6 more)
Multi-view computer
vision pipelines typically rely on accurate sparse keypoints and robust descriptors. While incorporating line features has shown clear benefits for matching and pose estimation, existing point-line approaches remain inefficient: they detect points and lines separately, use increasingly heavy networks, and depend on CPU-bound heuristics that hinder real-time performance. We introduce a Unified Efficient Points and Lines (UPAL) feature extractor that jointly extracts keypoints, line segments, and feature descriptors within a single lightweight architecture. A shared backbone provides common representations that feed different branches for point and line features. Line segments are recovered through an accelerated post-processing stage, an enhanced and highly efficient variant of the LSD
algorithm. UPAL matches or exceeds state-ofthe-art performance in both point and line applications while significantly reducing computational cost, achieving, for instance, a 4x speedup and 10x smaller
memory footprint over the ALIKED + DeepLSD pipeline. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/francois141/upal.
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All authors François Costa, Raphael Kreft, Eckhard Goedeke, Felix Möller, Hardik Shah, Ramanathan Rajaraman, Shaohui Liu, Rémi Pautrat, Marc Pollefeys
Computation and Language
Interrupting the Loop: Periodic Subject Changes Raise Judged Surprise and Connection in Base Language Models
Roberto I. Ono Filho
Where does the novelty a base
language model produces with no task come from, and what can an LLM judge of a long stream actually see? We dismantle a cognitively inspired generation loop over 24 conditions on three base models. Most of its effect lives in one operation: a new subject injected every few hundred
tokens (an interruption) into a stream whose literal repetition is damped (habituation). We judge windows of generated text only, with the premise as the unit (n=10) and a judge measured for repeatability, against a second judge family and human readers. Under that protocol the interruption raises judged surprise by 1.2 to 1.4 points and connection by 0.7 to 0.9 over habituation alone. A connective that asks for continuity hurts; a bare paragraph break adds nothing detectable; a reset context does at least as well as a kept one; and a pre-registered replication on new premises confirms the primary contrast. Three things the window judge could not see changed the first version of this study. The judge scores the experimenter's injected sentence as the model's own. A fixed rotation of injected sentences makes the model replay its own earlier segments (65-80% of post-interruption windows at periods 150-300 are mostly verbatim replay), and the judge scores the replay as surprise and, above all, as connection; at period 300 the source of 62% of windows lies beyond the judge's 600-
token horizon. And the local gains do not compose: no arm produces an integrated document. The salience monitor, the in-loop judge,
memory across interruptions and a gated Review add nothing. On a problem with a verifier (online bin packing), the interruption multiplies valid, distinct candidate heuristics three- to fourfold without raising the quality of the best. We report an evaluation protocol for long generation and a characterization of a simple intervention, not a mechanism of creativity.
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Artificial Intelligence
EXIMO: VLM Guided Exploration of VLA Policies
Bhavya Sukhija, Oliver Groth, Mohit Shridhar et al. (+5 more)
How to efficiently finetune
robot policies to learn new tasks on the fly? State of the art robotic manipulation policies are based on behaviour cloning of large
vision-
language-action (VLA) models with billions of parameters on huge teleoperation
datasets. While this simple approach has enabled significant advances for robotic manipulation, finetuning of VLA policies for learning new tasks still remains an open problem. In particular, collecting teleoperation
datasets requires hundreds of hours of expensive human labour and the alternative, reinforcement learning (RL), can be notoriously sample-inefficient especially for long-horizon tasks. In addition, RL with VLAs imposes several challenges due to the model's size and architectural design. In this work, we propose EXIMO, an efficient
algorithm for finetuning of VLA policies. EXIMO operates in three stages: explore, imitate, and optimize. During the explore phase, EXIMO equips the VLA with a
vision language model (VLM) that acts as a planner. The VLM thinks and breaks down challenging long-horizon problems into shorter ones for the VLA. The VLM, together with the VLA, is used to collect an orchestrated
dataset on new tasks. During the imitate phase, the VLA is finetuned with the orchestrated data. Finally, during the optimize stage, we use residual off-policy RL to further finetune the policy. In our experiments, we ablate all three stages of EXIMO and show that it outperforms existing approaches significantly in terms of sample-efficiency and final performance.
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All authors Bhavya Sukhija, Oliver Groth, Mohit Shridhar, Tim Hertweck, Michael Bloesch, Markus Wulfmeier, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Martin Riedmiller
Machine Learning
Reliable Neural Collapse Approximation for Open-World Test-Time Adaptation
Jia-Qi Lin, Yuangang Pan, Chang-Dong Wang et al. (+3 more)
Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods aim to bridge the domain gap between the source and target domains. However, traditional TTA methods become ineffective when the label distribution shift occurs, a challenge commonly referred to as an open-world scenario. In this paper, we introduce a new method named Reliable Neural Collapse approximation (ReNC) for Open-World Test-Time Adaptation (OWTTA). Specifically, we leverage neural collapse as a structural prior for reliable target-domain adaptation. Guided by this prior, we justify that the pre-trained classifier weights can serve as the prototypes of the source domain. By measuring the similarity between samples and prototypes, we filter out the Out-Of-Distribution~(OOD) samples for reliable updates. Furthermore, we propose a neural collapse approximation mechanism to refine these prototypes, ensuring they can gradually adapt to the target domain while maintaining the neural collapse structure. Extensive experiments on several open-world
benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. Our empirical analysis suggests that ReNC better preserves NC-related properties in the target domain, providing useful evidence for explaining reliable OWTTA and offering new insights for model design. Code is available at https://github.com/JiaqiLin-AI/ReNC.
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All authors Jia-Qi Lin, Yuangang Pan, Chang-Dong Wang, Haizhang Zhang, Ivor W. Tsang, Joey Tianyi Zhou
Artificial Intelligence
Write Once, Run Everywhere: The Axon DSL for Shape-Safe and Framework-Agnostic LLM Architectures
Jacob Nielsen, Danial Namazifard, Lukas Galke Poech et al. (+1 more)
The entire ecosystem of open-source
language models effectively relies on a single platform. What if this platform was forced to shut down tomorrow? Implementing and maintaining efficient model definitions and translating them between different training and inference regimes is a resource-heavy task that severely limits model efficiency and portability, hindering both scaling and deployment. Here, we present Axon, a strongly typed domain-specific
language with Haskell-like syntax, that enables a write-once, run everywhere paradigm for LLM architectures. By basing collaboration on a
language specification rather than a specific framework's
vision, Axon fosters open cooperation and empowers researchers to implement highly specialized architectures without giving up optimization infrastructure or accepting deployment lock-in. Axon allows for concise, auditable specifications that can be automatically compiled to standalone implementations for leading frameworks: PyTorch, PyTorch with Triton, JAX, MLX and vLLM. In 467 inference benchmarking experiments on models ranging from 135M to 32B parameters, we demonstrate median speedups of 7% on PyTorch, 12% on PyTorch with Triton, 91% on JAX, and 107% on MLX, compared to the reference implementations from
Transformers. When deployed as native vLLM architectures with PagedAttention and KV-cache, Axon models achieve a 58% median speedup over
Transformers implementations.
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All authors Jacob Nielsen, Danial Namazifard, Lukas Galke Poech, Peter Schneider-Kamp
Machine Learning
Evidence Before Expansion: Reuse, Spawn, or Defer in Lifelong Expert Pools
Kentaro Oda
Streaming systems that maintain a pool of expert models must repeatedly decide whether to reuse an existing expert for arriving data, spawn a new one, or defer. We present a decision layer that makes all three outcomes statistically meaningful. Reuse and spawn are posed as one-sided sequential hypotheses on a conditional (mechanism-level) discrepancy, separated by an indifference zone; defer is exactly the state in which neither betting e-process has accumulated sufficient evidence. We prove finite-time anytime validity for the observable surrogate discrepancy of a predictable discriminator sequence, and an unconditional one-sided transfer to the population quantity in which each side's slack is the excess risk of a single discriminator; an empirically observed downward-bias regularity makes the spawn side exactly conservative. Recency without sacrificing the guarantee is obtained by a restarted e-detector: a bank of unwindowed betting supermartingales at geometrically spaced restart times (O(log t)
memory), with the error budget spent over restart instances, which preserves lifetime anytime validity; spending over expert-creation order likewise controls multiplicity for unboundedly many experts. On synthetic multi-concept streams, Electricity, Covertype, and the recurrence-heavy INSECTS
benchmark, the instance-accounted restarted bank achieves zero false spawns and zero false reuses after switches and matches or exceeds the retired windowed heuristic (INSECTS-reoccurring accuracy 0.675), making the deployed
algorithm and the guaranteed
algorithm one and the same.
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Machine Learning
Separating Covariate Shift from Mechanism Change with Two Discriminators: CJSD, a Conditional Discrepancy with an Exact Covariate-Concept Decomposition
Kentaro Oda
After the inputs X are known, how much additional information does the label Y carry about which
dataset a sample came from? That single quantity – estimable as the difference of two discriminators' held-out cross-
entropies, D_CJS = CE(Z|X) - CE(Z|X,Y) – is exactly the part of a
dataset difference that
covariate shift cannot explain. We propose the Conditional Jensen-Shannon Discrepancy (CJSD): with a task indicator Z, the chain rule I(Z;X,Y) = I(Z;X) + I(Z;Y|X) splits total task discrepancy exactly into a
covariate axis and a functional axis, both estimable from two ordinary classifiers, with no task-specific predictors, generative models, or bootstrap surrogates. We prove a
covariate-null property (the functional axis is exactly zero under pure
covariate shift, however severe), a drift-mass law (D_CJS/ln2 equals the mass of the disagreement region for deterministic labels), a one-sided misspecification-control inequality (each direction of estimation error is bounded, unconditionally, by the excess risk of a single discriminator), and a fixed-measure metrization via an identifiability lemma. Empirically, on a ten-measure battery over 202
dataset pairs (synthetic, Electricity, Covertype), only the two conditional-information
estimators – CJSD and a kNN plug-in for the same estimand – separate concept from
covariate shift with AUC 1.0; the case for CJSD is the
estimator: under controlled dimensionality scaling the kNN plug-in fails from d=64 while the discriminator route holds to d=256 with a swappable classifier, and it alone yields paired confidence intervals and sequential extensions from the same learned object. The same
estimator audits the conditional fidelity of synthetic-data generators that marginal and joint QA metrics pass, detects annotation-guideline changes invisible to input-space monitors, and supports null-calibrated
fairness audits.
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Artificial Intelligence
TESTNAV: Pareto-Guided Search for Compositional Robustness Testing
Arooj Arif, Tobias Hartung, Elena Botoeva et al. (+1 more)
Deep learning models remain vulnerable to real-world input perturbations, especially when multiple corruptions co-occur in the same input (e.g., brightness shifts and motion blur). Compositional testing reveals these interaction effects but introduces two challenges: combinatorial growth of the perturbation space as dimensions and severity levels increase, and uneven diagnostic value-many combinations yield unrealistically degraded inputs with limited practical relevance. We present TESTNAV, 1 a Pareto-guided robustness testing framework for efficiently exploring discrete, compositional perturbation spaces when only a limited number of perturbation configurations can be evaluated. TESTNAV prioritises severe yet realistic failures by formulating robustness testing as bi-objective optimisation: maximise performance degradation while preserving input fidelity measured by modality-specific metrics (e.g., SSIM and KID for
vision; chrF and BERT-F1 for
language and code). It uses NSGA-II to approximate the bi-objective Pareto front. Across four
benchmarks spanning
vision, natural
language, and code generation, TESTNAV recovers Pareto fronts up to 2.15x faster than search-based baselines, using 35.8%-89.3% of the discrete perturbation space defined by four perturbation dimensions with six levels each.
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All authors Arooj Arif, Tobias Hartung, Elena Botoeva, Alexandros Koliousis
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SP
Interpretable Feature Learning for RF Fingerprinting via Polar MKANs
Mikhail Krasnov, Ljupcho Milosheski and Carolina Fortuna
Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting authenticates wireless devices from hardware-induced I/Q impairments, typically with deep learning feature extractors that are accurate but opaque, limiting their use in security critical settings. We propose Polar Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (Polar MKAN), a block partitioned monotonic encoder on polar inputs in which each latent dimension depends exclusively on magnitude or phase, yielding channel separation and monotone responses by construction. On a synthetic gain and carrier frequency offset (CFO)
benchmark, Polar MKAN reaches 57.2 percent DCI Disentanglement versus at most 12.9 percent for unpartitioned baselines. We further evaluate the detection accuracy trade off on real data and the sensitivity to blind CFO compensation.
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Artificial Intelligence
EnvHarness: Awakening Static Worlds for Agent Learning
Chengsong Huang, Zifeng Wang, Rujun Han et al. (+14 more)
LLM
agents learn by interacting with environments, yet these environments are hand-built and static: blind to an
agent's weaknesses, and quickly left behind as it improves. While recent environment generation methods attempt to address this, they require domain-specific pipelines, rely on expensive or unreliable verifiers, and still produce static environments. To alleviate the engineering burden of rebuilding environments from scratch, we propose Environment Harness (EnvHarness), a programmable layer of plug-in components that wraps a static environment to reshape its behavior without modifying the underlying logic. Operating through standard interfaces, EnvHarness applies across diverse domains while ensuring every reshaped environment retains its original verifier. To automate this process, we introduce EnvRigger, which treats the target policy as a black box, observing its execution trajectories to synthesize EnvHarness components targeting diagnosed flaws, and validating them via fresh rollouts. Across five
benchmarks in four domains, EnvHarness outperforms both original environments and domain-specific environment generation pipelines, achieving up to a 9.0-point improvement on held-out instances with 9.8% fewer execution steps. Furthermore, EnvHarness provides a superior optimization signal for reinforcement learning, enabling continuous, targeted co-
evolution of the policy and its environment.
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All authors Chengsong Huang, Zifeng Wang, Rujun Han, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Zoey CuiZhu, Ke Jiang, Peng Xia, Han Yu, Yufan Zhuang, Yifei Ming, Jiaqi Pan, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Jiaxin Huang, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ME
A Repeated Measurements Approach to $SoH$ Battery Modelling of Cyclic Aged Data in a Laboratory Environment
Mark Cary and Charles Bokor
This document describes the application of a first order linearised nonlinear repeated measurements approach to the analysis of battery
cell ageing profiles generated under controlled conditions in a laboratory. The primary advantage of the model is it reflects the obvious structure in the data. Consequently, it is a two-component of variance model: variation within ageing profiles (measurement noise) and variation among ageing profiles (test-to-test or
cell-to-
cell) variation. Novel regularised iterative generalised least squares parameter identification schemes, with optimal hyper-parameter re-estimation, are used to identify the hierarchical nonlinear model. The training data comprised $SoH$ profiles for 10
cells aged at various constant discharge and charge current cycles at a fixed chamber environmental temperature of 25 [$^\circ$C]. Each
cell $SoH$ profile is modelled using a simple power law expression, whereas the variation in ageing parameters is modelled using a single
knot cubic B-spline. $SoH$ is accurately predicted to $\pm 0.191\%$ for $SOH \in [0,20]$.
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Computation and Language
A knowledge-guided agentic framework for mitigating patient-context ambiguity in health queries
Mahyar Abbasian, Saba A. Farahani, Arshia Ilaty et al. (+3 more)
Patients often submit short, underspecified queries to healthcare chatbots that lack the patient-specific information needed to determine an appropriate response. Although these queries may be linguistically clear, they can support multiple plausible answers depending on undisclosed factors such as symptoms, diagnoses, medications, allergies, or dietary restrictions. A
language model answering such a query directly may therefore rely on unsupported assumptions about the patient. We introduce a knowledge-guided agentic framework for mitigating patient-context ambiguity before final response generation. The framework operates between the patient and an otherwise unchanged downstream
language model. It interprets the initial query, uses a task-specific knowledge graph to construct a set of plausible hypotheses, identifies the missing patient-context variables needed to distinguish among them, and asks targeted follow-up questions. The original query and the acquired context are then combined into a clarified
prompt for the downstream model. We evaluated the framework across five
language models using two controlled ambiguity-mitigation
benchmarks: diagnosis
retrieval from 1,034 symptom queries with clinically relevant evidence systematically masked, and dietary-safety classification from 487 queries with decisive health context omitted. The framework was compared with direct answering of the underspecified query and with rephrasing the same query without acquiring new patient information. In diagnosis
retrieval, it increased overall exact Top-1 accuracy by at least 57.1 percentage points and selective exact Recall@5 by at least 77.7 percentage points across the five evaluated models compared with direct prompting. In dietary-safety classification, it improved accuracy across all five models and achieved the highest Matthews correlation coefficient for four...
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All authors Mahyar Abbasian, Saba A. Farahani, Arshia Ilaty, Hung Cao, Ramesh Jain, Amir M. Rahmani
Human-Computer Interaction
Evaluating Smart Home Device User Responses to their (Un)Confirmed Privacy Expectations
Tania Khatun, Mahdieh Sheikh Rezaei, Danny Yuxing Huang et al. (+2 more)
Users of smart home devices are often unaware of how their devices handle personal data. We examine how revealing these data practices influences user trust, satisfaction, and coping behaviors, including decisions to block device communications. Using Expectation-Confirmation Theory, we conducted two complementary studies to balance ecological validity with experimental control. An in-situ field study used network monitoring to reveal actual device traffic, and an online experiment presented simulated reports with manipulated levels of advertising-related communications. Across both studies, when data practices aligned with user expectations, satisfaction increased, strengthening intentions to continue using the device. Defensive responses, however, followed different pathways: satisfaction predicted willingness to block in the in-situ field study, whereas collection concerns were the primary predictor of blocking in the experiment. Together, these findings show how transparency reshapes attitudes and behaviors among existing smart-home users, underscoring the role of expectation confirmation in real-world, continued-use contexts.
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All authors Tania Khatun, Mahdieh Sheikh Rezaei, Danny Yuxing Huang, Oded Nov, Reza Ghaiumy Anaraky
Information Theory · Cross-listed from math.CO
New upper and lower bounds on covering codes K_q(n,R) for alphabets of size 5 <= q <= 21
Mark Marosi
Let K_q(n,R) denote the minimum cardinality of a q-ary code of length n with covering radius R. We improve the known bounds on K_q(n,R) in 83 cases (82 distinct
cells). On the upper-bound side we give 25 improved bounds for 5<=q<=15 – twenty-four found by search and one propagated by monotonicity – using two complementary methods: an engineered focused local search seeded with structural constructions, and a large-neighbourhood search driven by exact full-space coverage transforms that evaluates every candidate codeword position simultaneously. These are, to our knowledge, the first improvements to any upper bound on K_q(n,R) with q >= 5 since the 2011 revision of Keri's tables; several bounds decrease by more than 20%, e.g. K_6(8,4)<=166 (previously 216) and K_8(10,5)<=1883 (previously 2461). On the lower-bound side we give 58 improved bounds for 6<=q<=21, obtained from the semidefinite programming hierarchy of Gijswijt and Polak, whose published results cover q<=5, by combining an exact-arithmetic reimplementation of the reduced program with a multiprecision solution pipeline. Every new lower bound is certified by a rational dual solution validated by a standalone exact-arithmetic checker; no floating-point computation is part of the trusted base. The same pipeline also gives strong numerical evidence of limits: on a dozen further
cells the certified value of the relaxation, which the solver reports as optimal to within its working precision, lies below the best known bound, indicating that no improvement is available there at this level of the hierarchy. One
cell is improved from both sides: 441<=K_6(10,4)<=2751, previously 417–2952. All codes and certificates are provided in machine-readable form together with standalone verifiers.
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Computer Vision
DIFFCZSL: Compositional Zero-Shot Learning Regularized by Diffusion Representations
Hangyu Tian, Zhenqi He, Yanghao Wang et al. (+1 more)
Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize unseen attribute-object compositions by leveraging knowledge of primitive concepts learned from seen compositions. Although recent works achieve impressive performance in CZSL by leveraging large
vision-
language models, they primarily rely on discriminative representations that may not explicitly preserve the structured relationships between primitive concepts and their compositions. Motivated by the recent success of
diffusion-based classifiers and their competitive performance relative to discriminative models, we investigate whether intermediate
diffusion representations can provide complementary cues for CZSL. To this end, we propose DIFFCZSL, a
diffusion-augmented framework that injects generative priors from pre-trained
diffusion models into CLIP-based CZSL pipelines. We extract intermediate
diffusion representations and project them into the CLIP
embedding space to provide auxiliary supervision on both image and text modalities. Through contrastive
alignment between CLIP
embeddings and
diffusion features during training, our method encourages the
embedding geometry toward richer composition-aware semantics, while introducing no additional cost at inference time. Extensive experiments on three public CZSL
benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over strong CLIP-based baselines under both closed-world and open-world settings. Our results highlight the complementary strengths of generative
diffusion representations and discriminative
vision-
language models for compositional generalization.
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All authors Hangyu Tian, Zhenqi He, Yanghao Wang, Long Chen
Information Theory
Sub-optimality of Marton's Inner Bound for the Two-Receiver Broadcast Channel
Mian Huang, Yanxiao Liu and Yi Liu
Marton's inner bound, the best-known achievable region for a general discrete memoryless broadcast channel, was proposed by Katalin Marton in 1979, and whether it always achieves the capacity region has remained open since then. In this paper, we establish its strict sub-optimality: we show that the capacity region of some discrete memoryless broadcast channels can be strictly larger than Marton's inner bound.
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Computer Vision
A 360-Degree Vision Dataset for Learning Yaw Control on GPS-Denied Micro-UAVs in Disaster-Response-Relevant Environments
Niklas Voigt and Hartmut Surmann
This paper presents a novel data-driven approach to camera-based autonomy for micro-drones in GPS-denied,
radio-challenging indoor environments. The target application is disaster and emergency response, where micro-
UAVs can provide rapid situational awareness in hazardous settings such as firefighting and chemical, biological, radiological, and
nuclear (CBRN) incidents while reducing risk for human responders. When the communication link is lost, the micro-drone uses a learned yaw controller to autonomously navigate toward open space, preserving onboard sensor data that would otherwise be lost with the vehicle. A custom micro-drone equipped with a 360-degree camera was used to record diverse industrial, underground, and training scenarios representative of communication-denied field operations. We introduce a preprocessing pipeline that converts equirectangular 360-degree footage into planar front views and dynamically generates image-label pairs for AI training. We then train and compare multiple convolutional neural network variants that predict a continuous yaw command from a single
monocular view. Evaluation on a held-out test set confirms the feasibility of the learned yaw-prediction approach. A semi-autonomous real-world test further demonstrates the practicality of the method while revealing key failure modes, particularly reflections and glare.
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Hardware Architecture · Cross-listed from eess.SP
A 39pJ/b 7.3Gbps 1.3mm$^2$ Multi-Subcarrier Massive MU-MIMO-OFDM Detector Exploiting Beamspace Sparsity and Frequency-Domain Correlation in 22FDX
Abhishek Kumar, Seyed Hadi Mirfarshbafan, Oscar Castañeda et al. (+1 more)
We present the first multi-subcarrier massive multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (
MIMO) orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) data detector reported in the open literature. By exploiting the channel's beamspace sparsity and frequency-domain (FD) correlation, we achieve up to 3x area and power reduction. Our design supports U=8 user equipments and B=64 basestation
antennas, computes soft outputs for QPSK to 256-QAM, and processes 16 subcarriers in parallel. The fabricated 22FDX ASIC has a core
cell area of 1.3mm$^2$, consumes 286mW, and delivers a throughput of 7.3Gbps at 0.8V core voltage, achieving best-in-class energy efficiency of 39pJ/b.
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All authors Abhishek Kumar, Seyed Hadi Mirfarshbafan, Oscar Castañeda, Christoph Studer
Artificial Intelligence · Cross-listed from eess.AS
Listening Forward: Next Patch Embedding Prediction Enables Scalable Audio Learners
Umberto Cappellazzo, Xubo Liu, Stavros Petridis et al. (+1 more)
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has driven substantial progress in audio representation learning, though existing methods have increasingly relied on elaborate pre-training recipes to reach competitive performance. A markedly different pre-training philosophy underpins the most influential progress in
language modeling and, more recently, in visual representation learning: rather than train encoders as static feature extractors, models are trained to predict the next element, a discrete
token or a continuous
embedding, from the preceding context. Autoregressive prediction thereby provides a unified pre-training interface that transfers across modalities, compelling the model to learn the underlying data distribution. We ask whether such a simple causal paradigm can yield strong audio learners, given that audio's temporal structure makes autoregressive prediction of patch
embeddings a natural fit. We introduce NAPE (Next-Audio-Patch-
Embedding prediction), a self-supervised framework in which a causal
Transformer predicts each next patch
embedding of a log-mel spectrogram from the previous ones, using causal masking and stop-gradient as its sole training signal. The design is intentionally minimalist, avoiding reconstruction decoders, acoustic tokenizers, student-teacher setups, and auxiliary regularization losses. Across six audio and
speech benchmarks, NAPE achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuning performance on several tasks, scales consistently across encoder sizes, and yields strong linear-probing results. NAPE also produces structured
attention patterns without explicit supervision.
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All authors Umberto Cappellazzo, Xubo Liu, Stavros Petridis, Maja Pantic
Artificial Intelligence
PolicyGuide: From Guarding One Action to Guiding the Whole Workflow for Policy-Compliant LLM Agents
Seongjae Kang, Taehyung Yu and Sung Ju Hwang
Customer-service LLM
agents must follow organizational policy when acting on a user's behalf. Compliance failures arise from either forbidden actions, such as granting an ineligible change, or omitted procedural requirements, such as identification or confirmation. Runtime safeguards can intervene on risky actions, but action-local checks do not guide an
agent through a multi-step procedure. Workflow-following systems support prescribed process execution, but primarily target workflow completion rather than safeguarding
agent behavior. PolicyGuide instead compiles each domain policy into a workflow graph and invokes a proactive verifier at user-turn boundaries. From persisted graph state, the verifier reconciles open requests and returns step-specific remediation along a policy-compliant path. Across the $\tau^2$-bench airline, retail, and telecom domains with a GPT 5.4
agent and verifier, PolicyGuide raises mean $\mathrm{Pass}^4$ from $0.42$ to $0.62$, with the largest gain on telecom ($0.19$ to $0.61$), the most workflow-structured domain. The same workflows transfer to Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Gemini 2.5 Pro
agents. Complementary evaluations find the lowest observed attack-success rate under
adversarial users and the strongest procedural compliance in an independently validated workflow-level audit.
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Computer Vision
AutoLumNet: Monotone Optimal Transport for Single-Shot Exposure Correction
Airin Akter Tania, Md Raihan Khan and Mohiuddin Ahmad
Single-shot exposure correction aims to map an arbitrarily degraded image—whether under-exposed, over-exposed, or a spatial mixture of both—to a well-exposed output from a single capture. We present AutoLumNet, a framework that decomposes this task into a global monotone tone curve and a bounded local residual, making the global component the locus of formal guarantees. The tone curve is parameterized as the normalized cumulative integral of a strictly positive density, ensuring strict monotonicity by construction rather than by penalty. We prove that this parameterization (i)~preserves the pairwise luminance ordering of all pixels and all spatial extrema unconditionally, and (ii)~is dense in the space of valid tone corrections, containing the one-dimensional optimal-transport map from the input to any target luminance distribution. A differentiable sorted-sample Wasserstein-2 objective drives the learned curve toward the OT optimum during training. Spatially varying effects that the global map provably cannot address—local shading, chrominance shifts, and clipped-region restoration—are handled by a bounded residual decoder with dual-branch convex fusion, for which we provide an explicit sufficient condition for local order preservation. Experiments on five
benchmarks (MSEC, SICE, LCDP, LOL-v1, LOL-v2-real) show that AutoLumNet achieves state-of-the-art PSNR and SSIM across both under- and over-exposure regimes at 11.2\,ms per frame, and generalizes zero-shot to pure low-light
benchmarks without retraining. To our knowledge, AutoLumNet is the first exposure-correction method to unite structural monotonicity, optimal-transport optimality, and bounded local adaptivity within a single trainable architecture. Code is available at https://github.com/kraihan/Autolumnet.
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Machine Learning
Online Test-Time Adaptation for Generalizable Dynamic Graph Anomaly Detection
Jialun Zheng, Hanchen Yang, Jiannong Cao et al. (+3 more)
Generalizable dynamic graph anomaly detection (DGAD) enables pretrained detectors to identify anomalies in unseen target domains without costly retraining. However, existing methods often fail for two reasons. First, they mainly rely on domain-agnostic patterns and miss domain-specific patterns that keep evolving. Second, they assume access to the full target domain data, whereas in more practical online test-time adaptation settings, target data arrive sequentially in unlabeled chunks. To address these limitations, we formulate online test-time adaptation for generalizable DGAD and propose OTTA-DGAD. OTTA-DGAD first extracts dynamic prototypes, i.e., evolving representations of normal and anomalous patterns, from temporal ego-graphs and stores them in a
memory buffer. The buffer selectively retains general patterns shared across the source domains used for pretraining while incorporating new patterns from the target domain. An anomaly scorer then compares incoming edge representations against these prototypes to identify both general and domain-specific anomalies. During adaptation, OTTA-DGAD updates the
memory buffer using reliable pseudo-labels identified through confidence-based detection. It further enriches each target chunk with relevant representations retained from previous chunks, compensating for information loss resulting from the sequential arrival of data. Extensive experiments under strict test-then-adapt OTTA settings demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on ten real-world
datasets from diverse domains.
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All authors Jialun Zheng, Hanchen Yang, Jiannong Cao, Yankai Chen, Yuanjing Feng, Philip S. Yu
Machine Learning
Inadvertent Context Leakage in Language Models
Jaiden Fairoze, Neal Mangaokar, Kamalika Chaudhuri et al. (+2 more)
For AI
agents to be useful beyond simple chat, they must hold sensitive user context such as calendars, credentials, health records, and financial data. We study whether the mere presence of such secrets in a model's context window introduces hidden correlations into the model's benign outputs, allowing reconstruction even when the model correctly refuses direct extraction. We further study whether an adversary can actively engineer
prompts that amplify this effect, using the model as a covert carrier to transmit secrets through seemingly innocuous text. In both cases, this limited leakage is exploited using a novel adaptive attack that assumes black-box access to the underlying model. In controlled experiments across eight proprietary models, we find that 2-digit in-context secrets are reconstructed with near-perfect accuracy and 4-digit secrets at 82% exact match, all from outputs the model produces in response to ordinary, non-
adversarial requests. We observe that more capable models leak more: stronger instruction-following amplifies sensitivity to in-context secrets, suggesting leakage is a byproduct of capability as opposed to a patchable bug. We show this leakage enables two practical attacks: (1) a trained classifier that infers semantic predicates about user
memories (e.g., health conditions, financial events) from routine natural-
language outputs, and (2) an RL-trained adversary that extracts full Social Security Numbers from a production-style
agent.
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All authors Jaiden Fairoze, Neal Mangaokar, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Sanjam Garg, Saeed Mahloujifar
Software Engineering
Repo0: Design-Driven Zero-to-All Code Generation
Silin Chen, Haoyi Teng, Xiaodong Gu et al. (+5 more)
Large
language model
agents have made substantial progress in code generation, yet most existing systems assume a predefined repository architecture. This assumption does not hold in zero-to-all code generation, where an
agent must construct an entire software project directly from natural-
language requirements while maintaining a modular repository architecture throughout development. We present Repo0, a continuous structural
evolution framework for zero-to-all code generation. Repo0 maintains an explicit architectural state instantiated as a Dual-Directed-Acyclic-Graph (Dual-DAG), consisting of a requirement-level DAG, a component-level DAG, and their
alignment relation. Starting from natural-
language requirements, it iteratively evolves component boundaries through structural actions guided by modularity metrics until structural convergence, after which the converged architecture guides test-driven development code generation. We evaluate Repo0 on six real-world repositories from RepoCraft using GPT-5 mini and DeepSeek V3.2. Repo0 achieves the highest Functionality Coverage and Pass Rate across all settings. Compared with RPG, the strongest repository-planning baseline, Repo0 improves Functionality Coverage by up to 20.08 percentage points and Pass Rate by up to 29.74 percentage points. Ablation and structural-
evolution analyses further demonstrate the importance of the Dual-DAG architectural state, modularity-guided structural
evolution, and explicit structural convergence.
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All authors Silin Chen, Haoyi Teng, Xiaodong Gu, Yuling Shi, Jiale Huang, Yongpan Wang, Hongyu Zhang, Haibing Guan
Information Theory
Resilience in Trustworthy Wireless Systems
Shixiong Wang, Yumeng Zhang and Hongyu Li
Resilience has emerged as a fundamental capability for future wireless systems operating in dynamic and uncertain environments. Although resilience has attracted growing
attention across academia, industry, and standardization, its conceptual scope, enabling mechanisms, and realization techniques remain fragmented. This paper presents a systematic framework of resilience in wireless systems from a trustworthiness perspective. We first formalize the concept of resilience and distinguish it from related uncertainty-aware terminologies, including reliability, robustness, adaptability, survivability, and recoverability. We then establish a hierarchical framework that organizes resilience into capability dimensions and enabling mechanisms, and that quantifies resilience through different technical aspects. We further use physical links and unmanned aerial vehicle networks as representative wireless scenarios to demonstrate how resilience can be systematically realized through the joint design of architectures, operations, and
algorithms. Finally, we examine the fundamental trade-offs in resilience engineering: Improving resilience generally incurs costs in resource efficiency, nominal performance, information acquisition, implementation complexity, and latency.
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Software Engineering
Further Progress Towards Operation Proof Obligation Generation for VDM
Nick Battle, Carlo Rende and Peter Gorm Larsen
The VDM formalism can ensure that models are internally consistent. Potential inconsistencies are highlighted by assertions called proof obligations. This paper is an update to the work described in [1], regarding proof obligation generation for VDM operations. We present the latest work which improves the approach to loop invariants, adds loop variants, improves proof obligations for operation calls, including implicitly declared operations and specification statements, and adds recursive measures for operations. The new features are illustrated with examples.
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Sound
Fourier is Frontier: Frequency-Aware Autoencoding for High-Fidelity Music Reconstruction
Kangdi Wang, Yusheng Dai and Jin Xu
Continuous-latent audio autoencoders form the backbone of latent music generators, yet decoders at high compression rates commonly exhibit three failure modes: high-frequency loss, phase incoherence, and stereo-image collapse. These share a structural root: waveform autoencoders lack an explicit frequency axis, leaving no handle for targeted per-band correction. Among five matched-budget representations, the complex STFT achieves the lowest full-band and high-frequency spectral distances, providing direct access to magnitude and phase at every bin. Building on this, we present ear-VAE2, a complex-spectral autoencoder with cross-channel interaction. Spec-SnakeBeta learns a periodic activation per frequency bin with frequency-dependent initialization, outperforming other activation variants while using fewer parameters than the fully independent variant. Duplex-Aware Refiner applies band-specific corrections to magnitude and phase following duplex theory of sound localization. On the 546-track Song Describer
Dataset, ear-VAE2 achieves the best point estimates on five of seven reconstruction metrics. The Duplex-Aware Refiner reduces Mel Distance by 19.4% and uses ~45% fewer residual-output dimensions than the Unconstrained Refiner, while also lowering spectral distances, spatial-cue errors, and receiving higher ratings from professional engineers. The downstream generator using ear-VAE2 latents achieves better point estimates on all 12 automatic metrics.Demo page is available at https://eps-acoustic-revolution-lab.github.io/EAR_VAE2/.
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