Daily Papers

Paper 1 of this research programme develops a resolution-aware risk-design framework for the simplest event-linked perpetual: a contract whose underlying tracks a single binary prediction-market probability through resolution. The instrument class is broader. Variants span conditional probabilities P(A|B), spreads p^A - p^B, weighted baskets sum w_i p^(i), derivatives on variance or entropy of the probability process, contracts on liquidity itself, perpetual-on-expiring-event roll structures, and funding-only derivatives with no settlement. Each variant inherits some framework components from the single-market binary case and requires its own design adaptations. This paper develops a formal taxonomy of seven pure-form canonical variants beyond the probability-index perpetual of Paper 1, organised along four orthogonal design axes: underlying geometry, temporal structure, settlement structure, and venue composition. The list is not exhaustive; combinations are not treated separately. For each variant we provide a precise payoff definition; an inheritance map identifying which Paper 1 components carry over, are modified, or fail; variant-specific design constraints; microstructure properties; empirical evaluability on the PMXT v2 archive; and limitations. Notable findings: the conditional variant admits a candidate non-portability proposition (denominator instability as the conditioning event becomes improbable); the spread variant requires a three-channel decomposition of resolution risk; the volatility/entropy variant avoids random binary terminal-collapse but introduces estimator-convention and entropy-decay issues; the basket variant requires multi-period jump-aware margin whose aggregation is correlation-dependent. The paper is theoretical primarily; it specifies how demonstrative time series can be constructed and provides evaluability criteria to guide future work.

Subnational studies of aid effectiveness often rely on repeated cross-sections or nighttime lights, making it difficult to separate local treatment effects from baseline differences and potentially favoring infrastructure-heavy projects. We address these limitations by studying World Bank and Chinese development projects in Africa with a balanced panel of 2,166 DHS clusters across 35 countries from 2002 to 2013. Geocoded AidData projects are linked to satellite-imputed International Wealth Index estimates, a household-centered measure of material living standards. We compare a conventional two-way fixed effects (TWFE) event-study with the switcher--stayer estimator of de Chaisemartin and D'Haultfoeuille (dCdH), which avoids contaminated comparisons under staggered treatment timing. Pre-treatment diagnostics show that project placement is frequently selective: clusters that later receive projects often begin from weaker relative positions before treatment onset. Consequently, TWFE often implies larger post-treatment gains than the preferred staggered-treatment design supports. Under dCdH, the evidence becomes more selective and sector-specific. For the World Bank, positive evidence is strongest in Health, while Education shows positive but less cleanly identified gains. For China, Water Supply and Sanitation and Other Social Infrastructure and Services show positive associations with local wealth, although residual selection concerns remain. By contrast, Chinese Energy Generation and Supply appears strongly positive under TWFE but falls close to zero under dCdH. Overall, the results do not support a donor-wide claim that either the World Bank or China uniformly improves local wealth. Instead, estimated effects are concentrated in a limited set of donor--sector panels and depend strongly on how treatment timing, selection, and outcome measurement are handled.

We study off-policy evaluation (OPE) of contextual bandit policies for large discrete action spaces where conventional importance-weighting approaches suffer from excessive variance. To circumvent this variance issue, we propose a new estimator, called OffCEM, that is based on the conjunct effect model (CEM), a novel decomposition of the causal effect into a cluster effect and a residual effect. OffCEM applies importance weighting only to action clusters and addresses the residual causal effect through model-based reward estimation. We show that the proposed estimator is unbiased under a new condition, called local correctness, which only requires that the residual-effect model preserves the relative expected reward differences of the actions within each cluster. To best leverage the CEM and local correctness, we also propose a new two-step procedure for performing model-based estimation that minimizes bias in the first step and variance in the second step. We find that the resulting OffCEM estimator substantially improves bias and variance compared to a range of conventional estimators. Experiments demonstrate that OffCEM provides substantial improvements in OPE especially in the presence of many actions.

Although appearance-based point-of-gaze (PoG) estimation has improved, the estimators still struggle to generalize across individuals due to personal differences. Therefore, person-specific calibration is required for accurate PoG estimation. However, calibrated PoG estimators are often sensitive to head pose variations. To address this, we investigate the key factors influencing calibrated estimators and explore pose-robust calibration strategies. Specifically, we first construct a benchmark, MobilePoG, which includes facial images from 32 individuals focusing on designated points under either fixed or continuously changing head poses. Using this benchmark, we systematically analyze how the diversity of calibration points and head poses influences estimation accuracy. Our experiments show that introducing a wider range of head poses during calibration improves the estimator's ability to handle pose variation. Building on this insight, we propose a dynamic calibration strategy in which users fixate on calibration points while moving their phones. This strategy naturally introduces head pose variation during a user-friendly and efficient calibration process, ultimately producing a better calibrated PoG estimator that is less sensitive to head pose variations than those using conventional calibration strategies. Codes and datasets are available at our project page.

A long standing challenge in computational chemistry and biophysics is efficiently sampling the Boltzmann distribution of molecules. Advances in generative modeling have been proposed to address the limitations of conventional sampling techniques by eliminating the computational cost of simulation. A promising direction is iteratively finetuning diffusion models along a temperature ladder whereby training data is generated via importance sampling during inference-time annealing. Unfortunately, these methods require computing a divergence over the score field to estimate importance weights, rendering them intractable for larger systems. Here we present scalable inference-time annealing (SITA), which retrains flow-based models to generate samples at progressively lower temperatures using an energy-based model to facilitate fast surrogate likelihoods. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both Alanine Dipeptide and Alanine Tripeptide while avoiding costly divergence terms. Our code is available at https://github.com/countrsignal/sita.git

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have transformed image generation with their impressive fidelity and diversity. We show that they also excel in estimating optical flow and monocular depth, surprisingly, without task-specific architectures and loss functions that are predominant for these tasks. Compared to the point estimates of conventional regression-based methods, diffusion models also enable Monte Carlo inference, e.g., capturing uncertainty and ambiguity in flow and depth. With self-supervised pre-training, the combined use of synthetic and real data for supervised training, and technical innovations (infilling and step-unrolled denoising diffusion training) to handle noisy-incomplete training data, and a simple form of coarse-to-fine refinement, one can train state-of-the-art diffusion models for depth and optical flow estimation. Extensive experiments focus on quantitative performance against benchmarks, ablations, and the model's ability to capture uncertainty and multimodality, and impute missing values. Our model, DDVM (Denoising Diffusion Vision Model), obtains a state-of-the-art relative depth error of 0.074 on the indoor NYU benchmark and an Fl-all outlier rate of 3.26\% on the KITTI optical flow benchmark, about 25\% better than the best published method. For an overview see https://diffusion-vision.github.io.

It is believed that in knowledge distillation (KD), the role of the teacher is to provide an estimate for the unknown Bayes conditional probability distribution (BCPD) to be used in the student training process. Conventionally, this estimate is obtained by training the teacher using maximum log-likelihood (MLL) method. To improve this estimate for KD, in this paper we introduce the concept of conditional mutual information (CMI) into the estimation of BCPD and propose a novel estimator called the maximum CMI (MCMI) method. Specifically, in MCMI estimation, both the log-likelihood and CMI of the teacher are simultaneously maximized when the teacher is trained. Through Eigen-CAM, it is further shown that maximizing the teacher's CMI value allows the teacher to capture more contextual information in an image cluster. Via conducting a thorough set of experiments, we show that by employing a teacher trained via MCMI estimation rather than one trained via MLL estimation in various state-of-the-art KD frameworks, the student's classification accuracy consistently increases, with the gain of up to 3.32\%. This suggests that the teacher's BCPD estimate provided by MCMI method is more accurate than that provided by MLL method. In addition, we show that such improvements in the student's accuracy are more drastic in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Notably, the student's accuracy increases with the gain of up to 5.72\% when 5\% of the training samples are available to the student (few-shot), and increases from 0\% to as high as 84\% for an omitted class (zero-shot). The code is available at https://github.com/iclr2024mcmi/ICLRMCMI.

We present a method named iComMa to address the 6D camera pose estimation problem in computer vision. Conventional pose estimation methods typically rely on the target's CAD model or necessitate specific network training tailored to particular object classes. Some existing methods have achieved promising results in mesh-free object and scene pose estimation by inverting the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). However, they still struggle with adverse initializations such as large rotations and translations. To address this issue, we propose an efficient method for accurate camera pose estimation by inverting 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, a gradient-based differentiable framework optimizes camera pose by minimizing the residual between the query image and the rendered image, requiring no training. An end-to-end matching module is designed to enhance the model's robustness against adverse initializations, while minimizing pixel-level comparing loss aids in precise pose estimation. Experimental results on synthetic and complex real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in challenging conditions and the accuracy of camera pose estimation.

BLDC motor applications require precise position and speed measurements, traditionally obtained with sensors. This article presents a method for estimating those measurements without position sensors using terminal phase voltages with attenuated spurious, acquired with a FPGA that also operates a PWM-controlled inverter. Voltages are labelled with electrical and virtual rotor states using an encoder that provides training and testing data for two three-layer ANNs with perceptron-based cascade topology. The first ANN estimates the position from features of voltages with incremental timestamps, and the second ANN estimates the speed from features of position differentials considering timestamps in an acquisition window. Sensor-based training and sensorless testing at 125 to 1,500 rpm with a loaded 8-pole-pair motor obtained absolute errors of 0.8 electrical degrees and 22 rpm. Results conclude that the overall position estimation significantly improved conventional and advanced methods, and the speed estimation slightly improved conventional methods, but was worse than in advanced ones.

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging involves capturing a series of frames of the same scene, each with different exposure settings, to broaden the dynamic range of light. This can be achieved through burst capturing or using staggered HDR sensors that capture long and short exposures simultaneously in the camera image signal processor (ISP). Within camera ISP pipeline, illuminant estimation is a crucial step aiming to estimate the color of the global illuminant in the scene. This estimation is used in camera ISP white-balance module to remove undesirable color cast in the final image. Despite the multiple frames captured in the HDR pipeline, conventional illuminant estimation methods often rely only on a single frame of the scene. In this paper, we explore leveraging information from frames captured with different exposure times. Specifically, we introduce a simple feature extracted from dual-exposure images to guide illuminant estimators, referred to as the dual-exposure feature (DEF). To validate the efficiency of DEF, we employed two illuminant estimators using the proposed DEF: 1) a multilayer perceptron network (MLP), referred to as exposure-based MLP (EMLP), and 2) a modified version of the convolutional color constancy (CCC) to integrate our DEF, that we call ECCC. Both EMLP and ECCC achieve promising results, in some cases surpassing prior methods that require hundreds of thousands or millions of parameters, with only a few hundred parameters for EMLP and a few thousand parameters for ECCC.

We present layered ray intersections (LaRI), a new method for unseen geometry reasoning from a single image. Unlike conventional depth estimation that is limited to the visible surface, LaRI models multiple surfaces intersected by the camera rays using layered point maps. Benefiting from the compact and layered representation, LaRI enables complete, efficient, and view-aligned geometric reasoning to unify object- and scene-level tasks. We further propose to predict the ray stopping index, which identifies valid intersecting pixels and layers from LaRI's output. We build a complete training data generation pipeline for synthetic and real-world data, including 3D objects and scenes, with necessary data cleaning steps and coordination between rendering engines. As a generic method, LaRI's performance is validated in two scenarios: It yields comparable object-level results to the recent large generative model using 4% of its training data and 17% of its parameters. Meanwhile, it achieves scene-level occluded geometry reasoning in only one feed-forward.

It's a practical approach using the ground-aerial collaborative system to enhance the localization robustness of flying robots in cluttered environments, especially when visual sensors degrade. Conventional approaches estimate the flying robot's position using fixed cameras observing pre-attached markers, which could be constrained by limited distance and susceptible to capture failure. To address this issue, we improve the ground-aerial localization framework in a more comprehensive manner, which integrates active vision, single-ranging, inertial odometry, and optical flow. First, the designed active vision subsystem mounted on the ground vehicle can be dynamically rotated to detect and track infrared markers on the aerial robot, improving the field of view and the target recognition with a single camera. Meanwhile, the incorporation of single-ranging extends the feasible distance and enhances re-capture capability under visual degradation. During estimation, a dimension-reduced estimator fuses multi-source measurements based on polynomial approximation with an extended sliding window, balancing computational efficiency and redundancy. Considering different sensor fidelities, an adaptive sliding confidence evaluation algorithm is implemented to assess measurement quality and dynamically adjust the weighting parameters based on moving variance. Finally, extensive experiments under conditions such as smoke interference, illumination variation, obstacle occlusion, prolonged visual loss, and extended operating range demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves robust online localization, with an average root mean square error of approximately 0.09 m, while maintaining resilience to capture loss and sensor failures.

This paper presents Elevator-LIO, a LiDAR-inertial odometry framework designed to achieve continuous robot localization during elevator travel, thereby supporting cross-floor robotic tasks. To address the state-estimation problem in non-inertial frames, Elevator-LIO establishes a decoupled state-estimation model that separately models the robot motion relative to the elevator and the elevator motion itself, and embeds it into a mode-dependent iterated error-state Kalman filter framework. This framework degenerates to conventional LIO estimation in ordinary indoor environments, while enabling the propagation and constrained update of elevator-related states in elevator non-inertial environments, thereby achieving continuous and stable localization. An elevator mode manager detects elevator entry and exit events using LiDAR ranging statistics and estimated states, and introduces event-triggered zero-velocity and zero-acceleration updates when the elevator stops to suppress accumulated vertical drift. In addition, this paper adopts an adaptive voxel downsampling strategy to maintain a stable number of effective points under significant environmental scale changes. We conduct extensive experiments on 20 real-world sequences containing 79 elevator rides, including practical challenges such as large-scale spaces, long vertical travel, dynamic pedestrian interference, and mirror reflections. The results show that Elevator-LIO maintains continuous localization accuracy in all sequences, with terminal height error below 1 cm in 17 sequences. In contrast, existing representative localization systems perform poorly on these elevator sequences. Tests on the Hilti 2022/2023 datasets further show that the proposed method remains competitive in standard indoor scenarios. The project page is available at https://xiaofan4122.github.io/Elevator_LIO_Page/.

This paper discusses pairing double/debiased machine learning (DDML) with stacking, a model averaging method for combining multiple candidate learners, to estimate structural parameters. In addition to conventional stacking, we consider two stacking variants available for DDML: short-stacking exploits the cross-fitting step of DDML to substantially reduce the computational burden and pooled stacking enforces common stacking weights over cross-fitting folds. Using calibrated simulation studies and two applications estimating gender gaps in citations and wages, we show that DDML with stacking is more robust to partially unknown functional forms than common alternative approaches based on single pre-selected learners. We provide Stata and R software implementing our proposals.

Using unsupervised learning to disentangle speech into content, rhythm, pitch, and timbre for voice conversion has become a hot research topic. Existing works generally take into account disentangling speech components through human-crafted bottleneck features which can not achieve sufficient information disentangling, while pitch and rhythm may still be mixed together. There is a risk of information overlap in the disentangling process which results in less speech naturalness. To overcome such limits, we propose a two-stage model to disentangle speech representations in a self-supervised manner without a human-crafted bottleneck design, which uses the Mutual Information (MI) with the designed upper bound estimator (IFUB) to separate overlapping information between speech components. Moreover, we design a Joint Text-Guided Consistent (TGC) module to guide the extraction of speech content and eliminate timbre leakage issues. Experiments show that our model can achieve a better performance than the baseline, regarding disentanglement effectiveness, speech naturalness, and similarity. Audio samples can be found at https://largeaudiomodel.com/eadvc.

Scale-aware monocular depth estimation poses a significant challenge in computer-aided endoscopic navigation. However, existing depth estimation methods that do not consider the geometric priors struggle to learn the absolute scale from training with monocular endoscopic sequences. Additionally, conventional methods face difficulties in accurately estimating details on tissue and instruments boundaries. In this paper, we tackle these problems by proposing a novel enhanced scale-aware framework that only uses monocular images with geometric modeling for depth estimation. Specifically, we first propose a multi-resolution depth fusion strategy to enhance the quality of monocular depth estimation. To recover the precise scale between relative depth and real-world values, we further calculate the 3D poses of instruments in the endoscopic scenes by algebraic geometry based on the image-only geometric primitives (i.e., boundaries and tip of instruments). Afterwards, the 3D poses of surgical instruments enable the scale recovery of relative depth maps. By coupling scale factors and relative depth estimation, the scale-aware depth of the monocular endoscopic scenes can be estimated. We evaluate the pipeline on in-house endoscopic surgery videos and simulated data. The results demonstrate that our method can learn the absolute scale with geometric modeling and accurately estimate scale-aware depth for monocular scenes.

Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs) represent sophisticated attack patterns in the cybersecurity domain, described encyclopedically in textual knowledge bases. Identifying TTPs in cybersecurity writing, often called TTP mapping, is an important and challenging task. Conventional learning approaches often target the problem in the classical multi-class or multilabel classification setting. This setting hinders the learning ability of the model due to a large number of classes (i.e., TTPs), the inevitable skewness of the label distribution and the complex hierarchical structure of the label space. We formulate the problem in a different learning paradigm, where the assignment of a text to a TTP label is decided by the direct semantic similarity between the two, thus reducing the complexity of competing solely over the large labeling space. To that end, we propose a neural matching architecture with an effective sampling-based learn-to-compare mechanism, facilitating the learning process of the matching model despite constrained resources.

We present GazeOnce360, a novel end-to-end model for multi-person gaze estimation from a single tabletop-mounted upward-facing fisheye camera. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on forward-facing cameras in constrained viewpoints, we address the underexplored setting of estimating the 3D gaze direction of multiple people distributed across a 360° scene from an upward fisheye perspective. To support research in this setting, we introduce MPSGaze360, a large-scale synthetic dataset rendered using Unreal Engine, featuring diverse multi-person configurations with accurate 3D gaze and eye landmark annotations. Our model tackles the severe distortion and perspective variation inherent in fisheye imagery by incorporating rotational convolutions and eye landmark supervision. To better capture fine-grained eye features crucial for gaze estimation, we propose a dual-resolution architecture that fuses global low-resolution context with high-resolution local eye regions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in our model. This work highlights the feasibility and potential of fisheye-based 360° gaze estimation in practical multi-person scenarios. Project page: https://caizhuojiang.github.io/GazeOnce360/.

Conventional 2D human pose estimation methods typically require extensive labeled annotations, which are both labor-intensive and expensive. In contrast, semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation can alleviate the above problems by leveraging a large amount of unlabeled data along with a small portion of labeled data. Existing semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation methods update the network through backpropagation, ignoring crucial historical information from the previous training process. Therefore, we propose a novel semi-supervised 2D human pose estimation method by utilizing a newly designed Teacher-Reviewer-Student framework. Specifically, we first mimic the phenomenon that human beings constantly review previous knowledge for consolidation to design our framework, in which the teacher predicts results to guide the student's learning and the reviewer stores important historical parameters to provide additional supervision signals. Secondly, we introduce a Multi-level Feature Learning strategy, which utilizes the outputs from different stages of the backbone to estimate the heatmap to guide network training, enriching the supervisory information while effectively capturing keypoint relationships. Finally, we design a data augmentation strategy, i.e., Keypoint-Mix, to perturb pose information by mixing different keypoints, thus enhancing the network's ability to discern keypoints. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets, demonstrate our method achieves significant improvements compared to the existing methods.

Conventional 2D pose estimation models are constrained by their design to specific object categories. This limits their applicability to predefined objects. To overcome these limitations, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) emerged as a solution. CAPE aims to facilitate keypoint localization for diverse object categories using a unified model, which can generalize from minimal annotated support images. Recent CAPE works have produced object poses based on arbitrary keypoint definitions annotated on a user-provided support image. Our work departs from conventional CAPE methods, which require a support image, by adopting a text-based approach instead of the support image. Specifically, we use a pose-graph, where nodes represent keypoints that are described with text. This representation takes advantage of the abstraction of text descriptions and the structure imposed by the graph. Our approach effectively breaks symmetry, preserves structure, and improves occlusion handling. We validate our novel approach using the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset spanning over 100 categories and 18,000 images. Under a 1-shot setting, our solution achieves a notable performance boost of 1.07\%, establishing a new state-of-the-art for CAPE. Additionally, we enrich the dataset by providing text description annotations, further enhancing its utility for future research.

3D human pose estimation (HPE) is characterized by intricate local and global dependencies among joints. Conventional supervised losses are limited in capturing these correlations because they treat each joint independently. Previous studies have attempted to promote structural consistency through manually designed priors or rule-based constraints; however, these approaches typically require manual specification and are often non-differentiable, limiting their use as end-to-end training objectives. We propose SEAL-pose, a data-driven framework in which a learnable loss-net trains a pose-net by evaluating structural plausibility. Rather than relying on hand-crafted priors, our joint-graph-based design enables the loss-net to learn complex structural dependencies directly from data. Extensive experiments on three 3D HPE benchmarks with eight backbones show that SEAL-pose reduces per-joint errors and improves pose plausibility compared with the corresponding backbones across all settings. Beyond improving each backbone, SEAL-pose also outperforms models with explicit structural constraints, despite not enforcing any such constraints. Finally, we analyze the relationship between the loss-net and structural consistency, and evaluate SEAL-pose in cross-dataset and in-the-wild settings.

Optical flow is a fundamental technique for motion estimation, widely applied in video stabilization, interpolation, and object tracking. Traditional optical flow estimation methods rely on restrictive assumptions like brightness constancy and slow motion constraints. Recent deep learning-based flow estimations require extensive training on large domain-specific datasets, making them computationally demanding. Also, artificial intelligence (AI) advances have enabled deep learning models to take advantage of optical flow as an important feature for object tracking and motion analysis. Since optical flow is commonly encoded in HSV for visualization, its conversion to RGB for neural network processing is nonlinear and may introduce perceptual distortions. These transformations amplify the sensitivity to estimation errors, potentially affecting the predictive accuracy of the networks. To address these challenges that are influential to the performance of downstream network models, we propose Reynolds flow, a novel training-free flow estimation inspired by the Reynolds transport theorem, offering a principled approach to modeling complex motion dynamics. In addition to conventional HSV-based visualization of Reynolds flow, we also introduce an RGB-encoded representation of Reynolds flow designed to improve flow visualization and feature enhancement for neural networks. We evaluated the effectiveness of Reynolds flow in video-based tasks. Experimental results on three benchmarks, tiny object detection on UAVDB, infrared object detection on Anti-UAV, and pose estimation on GolfDB, demonstrate that networks trained with RGB-encoded Reynolds flow achieve SOTA performance, exhibiting improved robustness and efficiency across all tasks.

Robust estimation is a crucial and still challenging task, which involves estimating model parameters in noisy environments. Although conventional sampling consensus-based algorithms sample several times to achieve robustness, these algorithms cannot use data features and historical information effectively. In this paper, we propose RLSAC, a novel Reinforcement Learning enhanced SAmple Consensus framework for end-to-end robust estimation. RLSAC employs a graph neural network to utilize both data and memory features to guide exploring directions for sampling the next minimum set. The feedback of downstream tasks serves as the reward for unsupervised training. Therefore, RLSAC can avoid differentiating to learn the features and the feedback of downstream tasks for end-to-end robust estimation. In addition, RLSAC integrates a state transition module that encodes both data and memory features. Our experimental results demonstrate that RLSAC can learn from features to gradually explore a better hypothesis. Through analysis, it is apparent that RLSAC can be easily transferred to other sampling consensus-based robust estimation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, RLSAC is also the first method that uses reinforcement learning to sample consensus for end-to-end robust estimation. We release our codes at https://github.com/IRMVLab/RLSAC.

We present an algorithm for reconstructing dense, geometrically consistent depth for all pixels in a monocular video. We leverage a conventional structure-from-motion reconstruction to establish geometric constraints on pixels in the video. Unlike the ad-hoc priors in classical reconstruction, we use a learning-based prior, i.e., a convolutional neural network trained for single-image depth estimation. At test time, we fine-tune this network to satisfy the geometric constraints of a particular input video, while retaining its ability to synthesize plausible depth details in parts of the video that are less constrained. We show through quantitative validation that our method achieves higher accuracy and a higher degree of geometric consistency than previous monocular reconstruction methods. Visually, our results appear more stable. Our algorithm is able to handle challenging hand-held captured input videos with a moderate degree of dynamic motion. The improved quality of the reconstruction enables several applications, such as scene reconstruction and advanced video-based visual effects.

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) enables data-driven maritime surveillance but suffers from reliability issues and irregular intervals. We address vessel destination estimation using global-scope AIS data by proposing a differentiated approach that recasts long port-to-port trajectories as a nested sequence structure. Using spatial grids, this method mitigates spatio-temporal bias while preserving detailed resolution. We introduce a novel deep learning architecture, WAY, designed to process these reformulated trajectories for long-term destination estimation days to weeks in advance. WAY comprises a trajectory representation layer and Channel-Aggregative Sequential Processing (CASP) blocks. The representation layer generates multi-channel vector sequences from kinematic and non-kinematic features. CASP blocks utilize multi-headed channel- and self-attention for aggregation and sequential information delivery. Additionally, we propose a task-specialized Gradient Dropout (GD) technique to enable many-to-many training on single labels, preventing biased feedback surges by stochastically blocking gradient flow based on sample length. Experiments on 5-year AIS data demonstrate WAY's superiority over conventional spatial grid-based approaches regardless of trajectory progression. Results further confirm that adopting GD leads to performance gains. Finally, we explore WAY's potential for real-world application through multitask learning for ETA estimation.

The inspiral, merger, and ringdown of Massive Black Hole Binaries (MBHBs) is one the main sources of Gravitational Waves (GWs) for the future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), an ESA-led mission in the implementation phase. It is expected that LISA will detect these systems throughout the entire observable universe. Robust and efficient data analysis algorithms are necessary to detect and estimate physical parameters for these systems. In this work, we explore the application of Sequential Neural Likelihood, a simulation-based inference algorithm, to detect and characterize MBHB GW signals in synthetic LISA data. We describe in detail the different elements of the method, their performance and possible alternatives that can be used to enhance the performance. Instead of sampling from the conventional likelihood function, which requires a forward simulation for each evaluation, this method constructs a surrogate likelihood that is ultimately described by a neural network trained from a dataset of simulations of the MBHB signals and noise. One important advantage of this method is that, given that the likelihood is independent of the priors, we can iteratively train models that target specific observations in a fraction of the time and computational cost that other traditional and machine learning-based strategies would require. Because of the iterative nature of the method, we are able to train models to obtain qualitatively similar posteriors with less than 2\% of the simulator calls that Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods would require. We compare these posteriors with those obtained from Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques and discuss the differences that appear, in particular in relation with the important role that data compression has in the modular implementation of the method that we present. We also discuss different strategies to improve the performance of the algorithms.

In this paper, we propose Iris, a deterministic framework for Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) that integrates real-world priors into the diffusion model. Conventional feed-forward methods rely on massive training data, yet still miss details. Previous diffusion-based methods leverage rich generative priors yet struggle with synthetic-to-real domain transfer. Iris, in contrast, preserves fine details, generalizes strongly from synthetic to real scenes, and remains efficient with limited training data. To this end, we introduce a two-stage Priors-to-Geometry Deterministic (PGD) schedule: the prior stage uses Spectral-Gated Distillation (SGD) to transfer low-frequency real priors while leaving high-frequency details unconstrained, and the geometry stage applies Spectral-Gated Consistency (SGC) to enforce high-frequency fidelity while refining with synthetic ground truth. The two stages share weights and are executed with a high-to-low timestep schedule. Extensive experimental results confirm that Iris achieves significant improvements in MDE performance with strong in-the-wild generalization.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) and Terahertz (THz)-band communications hold great promise in meeting the growing data-rate demands of next-generation wireless networks, offering abundant bandwidth. To mitigate the severe path loss inherent to these high frequencies and reduce hardware costs, ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (UM-MIMO) systems with hybrid beamforming architectures can deliver substantial beamforming gains and enhanced spectral efficiency. However, accurate channel estimation (CE) in mmWave and THz UM-MIMO systems is challenging due to high channel dimensionality and compressed observations from a limited number of RF chains, while the hybrid near- and far-field radiation patterns, arising from large array apertures and high carrier frequencies, further complicate CE. Conventional compressive sensing based frameworks rely on predefined sparsifying matrices, which cannot faithfully capture the hybrid near-field and far-field channel structures, leading to degraded estimation performance. This paper introduces DiffPace, a diffusion-based plug-and-play method for channel estimation. DiffPace uses a diffusion model (DM) to capture the channel distribution based on the hybrid spherical and planar-wave (HPSM) model. By applying the plug-and-play approach, it leverages the DM as prior knowledge, improving CE accuracy. Moreover, DM performs inference by solving an ordinary differential equation, minimizing the number of required inference steps compared with stochastic sampling method. Experimental results show that DiffPace achieves competitive CE performance, attaining -15 dB normalized mean square error (NMSE) at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 10 dB, with 90\% fewer inference steps compared to state-of-the-art schemes, simultaneously providing high estimation precision and enhanced computational efficiency.

Full quantum tomography of high-dimensional quantum systems is experimentally infeasible due to the exponential scaling of the number of required measurements on the number of qubits in the system. However, several ideas were proposed recently for predicting the limited number of features for these states, or estimating the expectation values of operators, without the need for full state reconstruction. These ideas go under the general name of shadow tomography. Here we provide an experimental demonstration of property estimation based on classical shadows proposed in [H.-Y. Huang, R. Kueng, J. Preskill. Nat. Phys. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0932-7 (2020)] and study its performance in the quantum optical experiment with high-dimensional spatial states of photons. We show on experimental data how this procedure outperforms conventional state reconstruction in fidelity estimation from a limited number of measurements.

Scene flow characterizes the 3D motion between two LiDAR scans captured by an autonomous vehicle at nearby timesteps. Prevalent methods consider scene flow as point-wise unconstrained flow vectors that can be learned by either large-scale training beforehand or time-consuming optimization at inference. However, these methods do not take into account that objects in autonomous driving often move rigidly. We incorporate this rigid-motion assumption into our design, where the goal is to associate objects over scans and then estimate the locally rigid transformations. We propose ICP-Flow, a learning-free flow estimator. The core of our design is the conventional Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, which aligns the objects over time and outputs the corresponding rigid transformations. Crucially, to aid ICP, we propose a histogram-based initialization that discovers the most likely translation, thus providing a good starting point for ICP. The complete scene flow is then recovered from the rigid transformations. We outperform state-of-the-art baselines, including supervised models, on the Waymo dataset and perform competitively on Argoverse-v2 and nuScenes. Further, we train a feedforward neural network, supervised by the pseudo labels from our model, and achieve top performance among all models capable of real-time inference. We validate the advantage of our model on scene flow estimation with longer temporal gaps, up to 0.4 seconds where other models fail to deliver meaningful results.

To enhance lifting-load estimation accuracy in industrial upper-limb assistive exoskeletons, this study proposes a machine learning-based approach using insole pressure sensors. Unlike traditional methods that rely on electromyography (EMG), force sensors, or posture data, insole pressure sensors provide a non-invasive, posture-independent, and stable solution suitable for long-term use. Lifting load data ranging from 2 to 10 kg (0.5 kg intervals) were collected from five subjects. Two data representations were investigated: channel-based vectors and map-based images. For the channel-based approach, conventional regression models (SVR, MLP, and Elastic Net) were trained on pooled data from all subjects to assess inter-subject generalization, specifically testing the ability to infer load levels unseen during training. In parallel, a preliminary feasibility study was conducted for the map-based deep learning model (MobileNetV2) using inner-subject data. Results indicate that the channel-based SVR achieved the most balanced accuracy and generalization performance, with a mean absolute error of 0.547 kg. These findings demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of using insole pressure data for variable load estimation, supporting control strategies in industrial exoskeleton applications.

In this paper, we present the first pinhole-fisheye framework for heterogeneous multi-view depth estimation, PFDepth. Our key insight is to exploit the complementary characteristics of pinhole and fisheye imagery (undistorted vs. distorted, small vs. large FOV, far vs. near field) for joint optimization. PFDepth employs a unified architecture capable of processing arbitrary combinations of pinhole and fisheye cameras with varied intrinsics and extrinsics. Within PFDepth, we first explicitly lift 2D features from each heterogeneous view into a canonical 3D volumetric space. Then, a core module termed Heterogeneous Spatial Fusion is designed to process and fuse distortion-aware volumetric features across overlapping and non-overlapping regions. Additionally, we subtly reformulate the conventional voxel fusion into a novel 3D Gaussian representation, in which learnable latent Gaussian spheres dynamically adapt to local image textures for finer 3D aggregation. Finally, fused volume features are rendered into multi-view depth maps. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that PFDepth sets a state-of-the-art performance on KITTI-360 and RealHet datasets over current mainstream depth networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of heterogeneous pinhole-fisheye depth estimation, offering both technical novelty and valuable empirical insights.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been widely praised for their high energy efficiency and immense potential. However, comprehensive research that critically contrasts and correlates SNNs with quantized Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) remains scant, often leading to skewed comparisons lacking fairness towards ANNs. This paper introduces a unified perspective, illustrating that the time steps in SNNs and quantized bit-widths of activation values present analogous representations. Building on this, we present a more pragmatic and rational approach to estimating the energy consumption of SNNs. Diverging from the conventional Synaptic Operations (SynOps), we champion the "Bit Budget" concept. This notion permits an intricate discourse on strategically allocating computational and storage resources between weights, activation values, and temporal steps under stringent hardware constraints. Guided by the Bit Budget paradigm, we discern that pivoting efforts towards spike patterns and weight quantization, rather than temporal attributes, elicits profound implications for model performance. Utilizing the Bit Budget for holistic design consideration of SNNs elevates model performance across diverse data types, encompassing static imagery and neuromorphic datasets. Our revelations bridge the theoretical chasm between SNNs and quantized ANNs and illuminate a pragmatic trajectory for future endeavors in energy-efficient neural computations.

We propose a direction of arrival (DOA) estimation method that combines sound-intensity vector (IV)-based DOA estimation and DNN-based denoising and dereverberation. Since the accuracy of IV-based DOA estimation degrades due to environmental noise and reverberation, two DNNs are used to remove such effects from the observed IVs. DOA is then estimated from the refined IVs based on the physics of wave propagation. Experiments on an open dataset showed that the average DOA error of the proposed method was 0.528 degrees, and it outperformed a conventional IV-based and DNN-based DOA estimation method.

We present a systematic study of fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper large-v3 for Swiss German ASR, using 1,367 hours of broadcast speech paired with Standard German subtitles as weak supervision. Through 16 iterative training runs on an NVIDIA DGX Spark (Grace Blackwell, 128 GB unified memory, up to 1 PFLOP FP4), we compare LoRA and full fine-tuning of the 1.55B-parameter model, investigate hallucination root causes, and quantify the effect of data quality, subtitle alignment, and training strategy. Our best model achieves 25.6% measured WER on the All Swiss German Dialects Test Set (ASGDTS) in an honest evaluation on strictly disjoint data. A harmonized error analysis separating genuine errors from valid stylistic variation (tense, word order, Swiss orthography) yields a content WER (cWER) of 13.8%, counting only actual recognition failures. Bias-corrected estimation reduces this to 8.5%, suggesting the true error rate is roughly one third of measured WER. We demonstrate that published state-of-the-art Swiss German ASR results (17.1-17.5% WER) are inflated by benchmark contamination: a vanilla Whisper model self-trained on the ASGDTS test set with zero Swiss German data achieves 13.88% WER, surpassing all published systems. Experiments with Phi-4-multimodal show an even stronger memorization effect (3.9% WER), revealing that the benchmark primarily measures convention matching rather than dialectal comprehension. We release two models, a LoRA adapter (25.32% WER, 13.9% cWER) and a full fine-tuned model (25.60% WER, 13.8% cWER), among the few publicly available, honestly evaluated Whisper models for Swiss German, under Apache 2.0 with full reproducibility, requiring no institutional data agreements.

One-shot voice conversion aims to change the timbre of any source speech to match that of the unseen target speaker with only one speech sample. Existing methods face difficulties in satisfactory speech representation disentanglement and suffer from sizable networks as some of them leverage numerous complex modules for disentanglement. In this paper, we propose a model named MAIN-VC to effectively disentangle via a concise neural network. The proposed model utilizes Siamese encoders to learn clean representations, further enhanced by the designed mutual information estimator. The Siamese structure and the newly designed convolution module contribute to the lightweight of our model while ensuring performance in diverse voice conversion tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieves comparable subjective scores and exhibits improvements in objective metrics compared to existing methods in a one-shot voice conversion scenario.

Hand Pose Estimation (HPE) is crucial to many applications, but conventional cameras-based CM-HPE methods are completely subject to Line-of-Sight (LoS), as cameras cannot capture occluded objects. In this paper, we propose to exploit Radio-Frequency-Vision (RF-vision) capable of bypassing obstacles for achieving occluded HPE, and we introduce OCHID-Fi as the first RF-HPE method with 3D pose estimation capability. OCHID-Fi employs wideband RF sensors widely available on smart devices (e.g., iPhones) to probe 3D human hand pose and extract their skeletons behind obstacles. To overcome the challenge in labeling RF imaging given its human incomprehensible nature, OCHID-Fi employs a cross-modality and cross-domain training process. It uses a pre-trained CM-HPE network and a synchronized CM/RF dataset, to guide the training of its complex-valued RF-HPE network under LoS conditions. It further transfers knowledge learned from labeled LoS domain to unlabeled occluded domain via adversarial learning, enabling OCHID-Fi to generalize to unseen occluded scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of OCHID-Fi: it achieves comparable accuracy to CM-HPE under normal conditions while maintaining such accuracy even in occluded scenarios, with empirical evidence for its generalizability to new domains.

Monocular normal estimation for transparent objects is critical for laboratory automation, yet it remains challenging due to complex light refraction and reflection. These optical properties often lead to catastrophic failures in conventional depth and normal sensors, hindering the deployment of embodied AI in scientific environments. We propose TransNormal, a novel framework that adapts pre-trained diffusion priors for single-step normal regression. To handle the lack of texture in transparent surfaces, TransNormal integrates dense visual semantics from DINOv3 via a cross-attention mechanism, providing strong geometric cues. Furthermore, we employ a multi-task learning objective and wavelet-based regularization to ensure the preservation of fine-grained structural details. To support this task, we introduce TransNormal-Synthetic, a physics-based dataset with high-fidelity normal maps for transparent labware. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TransNormal significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods: on the ClearGrasp benchmark, it reduces mean error by 24.4% and improves 11.25° accuracy by 22.8%; on ClearPose, it achieves a 15.2% reduction in mean error. The code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://longxiang-ai.github.io/TransNormal.

This work introduces a novel deep-learning approach for estimating age from a single facial image by refining an initial age estimate. The refinement leverages a reference face database of individuals with similar ages and appearances. We employ a network that estimates age differences between an input image and reference images with known ages, thus refining the initial estimate. Our method explicitly models age-dependent facial variations using differential regression, yielding improved accuracy compared to conventional absolute age estimation. Additionally, we introduce an age augmentation scheme that iteratively refines initial age estimates by modeling their error distribution during training. This iterative approach further enhances the initial estimates. Our approach surpasses existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on the MORPH II and CACD datasets. Furthermore, we examine the biases inherent in contemporary state-of-the-art age estimation techniques.

The absolute depth values of surrounding environments provide crucial cues for various assistive technologies, such as localization, navigation, and 3D structure estimation. We propose that accurate depth estimated from panoramic images can serve as a powerful and light-weight input for a wide range of downstream tasks requiring 3D information. While panoramic images can easily capture the surrounding context from commodity devices, the estimated depth shares the limitations of conventional image-based depth estimation; the performance deteriorates under large domain shifts and the absolute values are still ambiguous to infer from 2D observations. By taking advantage of the holistic view, we mitigate such effects in a self-supervised way and fine-tune the network with geometric consistency during the test phase. Specifically, we construct a 3D point cloud from the current depth prediction and project the point cloud at various viewpoints or apply stretches on the current input image to generate synthetic panoramas. Then we minimize the discrepancy of the 3D structure estimated from synthetic images without collecting additional data. We empirically evaluate our method in robot navigation and map-free localization where our method shows large performance enhancements. Our calibration method can therefore widen the applicability under various external conditions, serving as a key component for practical panorama-based machine vision systems.

Biodiversity assessments are critically affected by the spatial scale at which species richness is measured. How species richness accumulates with sampling area depends on natural and anthropogenic processes whose effects can change depending on the spatial scale considered. These accumulation dynamics, described by the species-area relationship (SAR), are challenging to assess because most biodiversity surveys are restricted to sampling areas much smaller than the scales at which these processes operate. Here, we combine sampling theory and deep learning to predict local species richness within arbitrarily large sampling areas, enabling for the first time to estimate spatial differences in SARs. We demonstrate our approach by predicting vascular plant species richness across Europe and evaluate predictions against an independent dataset of plant community inventories. The resulting model, named deep SAR, delivers multi-scale species richness maps, improving coarse grain richness estimates by 32% compared to conventional methods, while delivering finer grain estimates. Additional to its predictive capabilities, we show how our deep SAR model can provide fundamental insights on the multi-scale effects of key biodiversity processes. The capacity of our approach to deliver comprehensive species richness estimates across the full spectrum of ecologically relevant scales is essential for robust biodiversity assessments and forecasts under global change.

Recent advancements in millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar have demonstrated its potential for human action recognition and pose estimation, offering privacy-preserving advantages over conventional cameras while maintaining occlusion robustness, with promising applications in human-computer interaction and wellness care. However, existing mmWave systems typically employ fixed-position configurations, restricting user mobility to predefined zones and limiting practical deployment scenarios. We introduce mmEgoHand, a head-mounted egocentric system for hand pose estimation to support applications such as gesture recognition, VR interaction, skill digitization and assessment, and robotic teleoperation. mmEgoHand synergistically integrates mmWave radar with inertial measurement units (IMUs) to enable dynamic perception. The IMUs actively compensate for radar interference induced by head movements, while our novel end-to-end Transformer architecture simultaneously estimates 3D hand keypoint coordinates through multi-modal sensor fusion. This dual-modality framework achieves spatial-temporal alignment of mmWave heatmaps with IMUs, overcoming viewpoint instability inherent in egocentric sensing scenarios. We further demonstrate that intermediate hand pose representations substantially improve performance in downstream task, e.g., VR gesture recognition. Extensive evaluations with 10 subjects performing 8 gestures across 3 distinct postures -- standing, sitting, lying -- achieve 90.8% recognition accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions by a large margin. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/WhisperYi/mmVR.

With the growing prominence of the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture in developing large-scale foundation models, we investigate the Hierarchical Mixture of Experts (HMoE), a specialized variant of MoE that excels in handling complex inputs and improving performance on targeted tasks. Our analysis highlights the advantages of using the Laplace gating function over the traditional Softmax gating within the HMoE frameworks. We theoretically demonstrate that applying the Laplace gating function at both levels of the HMoE model helps eliminate undesirable parameter interactions caused by the Softmax gating and, therefore, accelerates the expert convergence as well as enhances the expert specialization. Empirical validation across diverse scenarios supports these theoretical claims. This includes large-scale multimodal tasks, image classification, and latent domain discovery and prediction tasks, where our modified HMoE models show great performance improvements compared to the conventional HMoE models.

This paper reformulates cross-dataset human pose estimation as a continual learning task, aiming to integrate new keypoints and pose variations into existing models without losing accuracy on previously learned datasets. We benchmark this formulation against established regularization-based methods for mitigating catastrophic forgetting, including EWC, LFL, and LwF. Moreover, we propose a novel regularization method called Importance-Weighted Distillation (IWD), which enhances conventional LwF by introducing a layer-wise distillation penalty and dynamic temperature adjustment based on layer importance for previously learned knowledge. This allows for a controlled adaptation to new tasks that respects the stability-plasticity balance critical in continual learning. Through extensive experiments across three datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing regularization-based continual learning strategies. IWD shows an average improvement of 3.60\% over the state-of-the-art LwF method. The results highlight the potential of our method to serve as a robust framework for real-world applications where models must evolve with new data without forgetting past knowledge.

Recently, the RGB images and point clouds fusion methods have been proposed to jointly estimate 2D optical flow and 3D scene flow. However, as both conventional RGB cameras and LiDAR sensors adopt a frame-based data acquisition mechanism, their performance is limited by the fixed low sampling rates, especially in highly-dynamic scenes. By contrast, the event camera can asynchronously capture the intensity changes with a very high temporal resolution, providing complementary dynamic information of the observed scenes. In this paper, we incorporate RGB images, Point clouds and Events for joint optical flow and scene flow estimation with our proposed multi-stage multimodal fusion model, RPEFlow. First, we present an attention fusion module with a cross-attention mechanism to implicitly explore the internal cross-modal correlation for 2D and 3D branches, respectively. Second, we introduce a mutual information regularization term to explicitly model the complementary information of three modalities for effective multimodal feature learning. We also contribute a new synthetic dataset to advocate further research. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that our model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art by a wide margin. Code and dataset is available at https://npucvr.github.io/RPEFlow.

In this paper, we present KeyMatchNet, a novel network for zero-shot pose estimation in 3D point clouds. Our method uses only depth information, making it more applicable for many industrial use cases, as color information is seldom available. The network is composed of two parallel components for computing object and scene features. The features are then combined to create matches used for pose estimation. The parallel structure allows for pre-processing of the individual parts, which decreases the run-time. Using a zero-shot network allows for a very short set-up time, as it is not necessary to train models for new objects. However, as the network is not trained for the specific object, zero-shot pose estimation methods generally have lower accuracy compared with conventional methods. To address this, we reduce the complexity of the task by including the scenario information during training. This is typically not feasible as collecting real data for new tasks drastically increases the cost. However, for zero-shot pose estimation, training for new objects is not necessary and the expensive data collection can thus be performed only once. Our method is trained on 1,500 objects and is only tested on unseen objects. We demonstrate that the trained network can not only accurately estimate poses for novel objects, but also demonstrate the ability of the network on objects outside of the trained class. Test results are also shown on real data. We believe that the presented method is valuable for many real-world scenarios. Project page available at keymatchnet.github.io

Quantum Krylov subspace diagonalization (QKSD) algorithms provide a low-cost alternative to the conventional quantum phase estimation algorithm for estimating the ground and excited-state energies of a quantum many-body system. While QKSD algorithms typically rely on using the Hadamard test for estimating Krylov subspace matrix elements of the form, langle ϕ_i|e^{-iHτ}|ϕ_j rangle, the associated quantum circuits require an ancilla qubit with controlled multi-qubit gates that can be quite costly for near-term quantum hardware. In this work, we show that a wide class of Hamiltonians relevant to condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry contain symmetries that can be exploited to avoid the use of the Hadamard test. We propose a multi-fidelity estimation protocol that can be used to compute such quantities showing that our approach, when combined with efficient single-fidelity estimation protocols, provides a substantial reduction in circuit depth. In addition, we develop a unified theory of quantum Krylov subspace algorithms and present three new quantum-classical algorithms for the ground and excited-state energy estimation problems, where each new algorithm provides various advantages and disadvantages in terms of total number of calls to the quantum computer, gate depth, classical complexity, and stability of the generalized eigenvalue problem within the Krylov subspace.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on reasoning tasks. They utilize autoregressive token generation to construct reasoning trajectories, enabling the development of a coherent chain of thought. In this work, we explore the impact of individual tokens on the final outcomes of reasoning tasks. We identify the existence of ``critical tokens'' that lead to incorrect reasoning trajectories in LLMs. Specifically, we find that LLMs tend to produce positive outcomes when forced to decode other tokens instead of critical tokens. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel approach - cDPO - designed to automatically recognize and conduct token-level rewards for the critical tokens during the alignment process. Specifically, we develop a contrastive estimation approach to automatically identify critical tokens. It is achieved by comparing the generation likelihood of positive and negative models. To achieve this, we separately fine-tune the positive and negative models on various reasoning trajectories, consequently, they are capable of identifying identify critical tokens within incorrect trajectories that contribute to erroneous outcomes. Moreover, to further align the model with the critical token information during the alignment process, we extend the conventional DPO algorithms to token-level DPO and utilize the differential likelihood from the aforementioned positive and negative model as important weight for token-level DPO learning.Experimental results on GSM8K and MATH500 benchmarks with two-widely used models Llama-3 (8B and 70B) and deepseek-math (7B) demonstrate the effectiveness of the propsoed approach cDPO.

Object pose estimation is a fundamental computer vision problem with broad applications in augmented reality and robotics. Over the past decade, deep learning models, due to their superior accuracy and robustness, have increasingly supplanted conventional algorithms reliant on engineered point pair features. Nevertheless, several challenges persist in contemporary methods, including their dependency on labeled training data, model compactness, robustness under challenging conditions, and their ability to generalize to novel unseen objects. A recent survey discussing the progress made on different aspects of this area, outstanding challenges, and promising future directions, is missing. To fill this gap, we discuss the recent advances in deep learning-based object pose estimation, covering all three formulations of the problem, i.e., instance-level, category-level, and unseen object pose estimation. Our survey also covers multiple input data modalities, degrees-of-freedom of output poses, object properties, and downstream tasks, providing the readers with a holistic understanding of this field. Additionally, it discusses training paradigms of different domains, inference modes, application areas, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets, as well as reports the performance of current state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks, thereby facilitating the readers in selecting the most suitable method for their application. Finally, the survey identifies key challenges, reviews the prevailing trends along with their pros and cons, and identifies promising directions for future research. We also keep tracing the latest works at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/Awesome-Object-Pose-Estimation.

Robust 3D geometry estimation from videos is critical for applications such as autonomous navigation, SLAM, and 3D scene reconstruction. Recent methods like DUSt3R demonstrate that regressing dense pointmaps from image pairs enables accurate and efficient pose-free reconstruction. However, existing RGB-only approaches struggle under real-world conditions involving dynamic objects and extreme illumination, due to the inherent limitations of conventional cameras. In this paper, we propose EAG3R, a novel geometry estimation framework that augments pointmap-based reconstruction with asynchronous event streams. Built upon the MonST3R backbone, EAG3R introduces two key innovations: (1) a retinex-inspired image enhancement module and a lightweight event adapter with SNR-aware fusion mechanism that adaptively combines RGB and event features based on local reliability; and (2) a novel event-based photometric consistency loss that reinforces spatiotemporal coherence during global optimization. Our method enables robust geometry estimation in challenging dynamic low-light scenes without requiring retraining on night-time data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAG3R significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RGB-only baselines across monocular depth estimation, camera pose tracking, and dynamic reconstruction tasks.

Accurate whole-body multi-person pose estimation and tracking is an important yet challenging topic in computer vision. To capture the subtle actions of humans for complex behavior analysis, whole-body pose estimation including the face, body, hand and foot is essential over conventional body-only pose estimation. In this paper, we present AlphaPose, a system that can perform accurate whole-body pose estimation and tracking jointly while running in realtime. To this end, we propose several new techniques: Symmetric Integral Keypoint Regression (SIKR) for fast and fine localization, Parametric Pose Non-Maximum-Suppression (P-NMS) for eliminating redundant human detections and Pose Aware Identity Embedding for jointly pose estimation and tracking. During training, we resort to Part-Guided Proposal Generator (PGPG) and multi-domain knowledge distillation to further improve the accuracy. Our method is able to localize whole-body keypoints accurately and tracks humans simultaneously given inaccurate bounding boxes and redundant detections. We show a significant improvement over current state-of-the-art methods in both speed and accuracy on COCO-wholebody, COCO, PoseTrack, and our proposed Halpe-FullBody pose estimation dataset. Our model, source codes and dataset are made publicly available at https://github.com/MVIG-SJTU/AlphaPose.

Traditional 2D pose estimation models are limited by their category-specific design, making them suitable only for predefined object categories. This restriction becomes particularly challenging when dealing with novel objects due to the lack of relevant training data. To address this limitation, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) was introduced. CAPE aims to enable keypoint localization for arbitrary object categories using a single model, requiring minimal support images with annotated keypoints. This approach not only enables object pose generation based on arbitrary keypoint definitions but also significantly reduces the associated costs, paving the way for versatile and adaptable pose estimation applications. We present a novel approach to CAPE that leverages the inherent geometrical relations between keypoints through a newly designed Graph Transformer Decoder. By capturing and incorporating this crucial structural information, our method enhances the accuracy of keypoint localization, marking a significant departure from conventional CAPE techniques that treat keypoints as isolated entities. We validate our approach on the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 20,000 images spanning more than 100 categories. Our method outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by substantial margins, achieving remarkable improvements of 2.16% and 1.82% under 1-shot and 5-shot settings, respectively. Furthermore, our method's end-to-end training demonstrates both scalability and efficiency compared to previous CAPE approaches.

Stereo depth estimation is fundamental to underwater robotic perception, yet suffers from severe domain shifts caused by wavelength-dependent light attenuation, scattering, and refraction. Recent approaches leverage monocular foundation models with GRU-based iterative refinement for underwater adaptation; however, the sequential gating and local convolutional kernels in GRUs necessitate multiple iterations for long-range disparity propagation, limiting performance in large-disparity and textureless underwater regions. In this paper, we propose StereoAdapter-2, which replaces the conventional ConvGRU updater with a novel ConvSS2D operator based on selective state space models. The proposed operator employs a four-directional scanning strategy that naturally aligns with epipolar geometry while capturing vertical structural consistency, enabling efficient long-range spatial propagation within a single update step at linear computational complexity. Furthermore, we construct UW-StereoDepth-80K, a large-scale synthetic underwater stereo dataset featuring diverse baselines, attenuation coefficients, and scattering parameters through a two-stage generative pipeline combining semantic-aware style transfer and geometry-consistent novel view synthesis. Combined with dynamic LoRA adaptation inherited from StereoAdapter, our framework achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on underwater benchmarks with 17% improvement on TartanAir-UW and 7.2% improvment on SQUID, with real-world validation on the BlueROV2 platform demonstrates the robustness of our approach. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/StereoAdapter-2. Website: https://aigeeksgroup.github.io/StereoAdapter-2.

Multi-object tracking, player identification, and pose estimation are fundamental components of sports analytics, essential for analyzing player movements, performance, and tactical strategies. However, existing datasets and methodologies primarily target mainstream team sports such as soccer and conventional 5-on-5 basketball, often overlooking scenarios involving fixed-camera setups commonly used at amateur levels, less mainstream sports, or datasets that explicitly incorporate pose annotations. In this paper, we propose the TrackID3x3 dataset, the first publicly available comprehensive dataset specifically designed for multi-player tracking, player identification, and pose estimation in 3x3 basketball scenarios. The dataset comprises three distinct subsets (Indoor fixed-camera, Outdoor fixed-camera, and Drone camera footage), capturing diverse full-court camera perspectives and environments. We also introduce the Track-ID task, a simplified variant of the game state reconstruction task that excludes field detection and focuses exclusively on fixed-camera scenarios. To evaluate performance, we propose a baseline algorithm called Track-ID algorithm, tailored to assess tracking and identification quality. Furthermore, our benchmark experiments, utilizing recent multi-object tracking algorithms (e.g., BoT-SORT-ReID) and top-down pose estimation methods (HRNet, RTMPose, and SwinPose), demonstrate robust results and highlight remaining challenges. Our dataset and evaluation benchmarks provide a solid foundation for advancing automated analytics in 3x3 basketball. Dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/open-starlab/TrackID3x3.

Monocular 3D estimation is crucial for visual perception. However, current methods fall short by relying on oversimplified assumptions, such as pinhole camera models or rectified images. These limitations severely restrict their general applicability, causing poor performance in real-world scenarios with fisheye or panoramic images and resulting in substantial context loss. To address this, we present UniK3D, the first generalizable method for monocular 3D estimation able to model any camera. Our method introduces a spherical 3D representation which allows for better disentanglement of camera and scene geometry and enables accurate metric 3D reconstruction for unconstrained camera models. Our camera component features a novel, model-independent representation of the pencil of rays, achieved through a learned superposition of spherical harmonics. We also introduce an angular loss, which, together with the camera module design, prevents the contraction of the 3D outputs for wide-view cameras. A comprehensive zero-shot evaluation on 13 diverse datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance of UniK3D across 3D, depth, and camera metrics, with substantial gains in challenging large-field-of-view and panoramic settings, while maintaining top accuracy in conventional pinhole small-field-of-view domains. Code and models are available at github.com/lpiccinelli-eth/unik3d .

State estimation is highly critical for accurately observing the dynamic behavior of the power grids and minimizing risks from cyber threats. However, existing state estimation methods encounter challenges in accurately capturing power system dynamics, primarily because of limitations in encoding the grid topology and sparse measurements. This paper proposes a physics-informed graphical learning state estimation method to address these limitations by leveraging both domain physical knowledge and a graph neural network (GNN). We employ a GNN architecture that can handle the graph-structured data of power systems more effectively than traditional data-driven methods. The physics-based knowledge is constructed from the branch current formulation, making the approach adaptable to both transmission and distribution systems. The validation results of three IEEE test systems show that the proposed method can achieve lower mean square error more than 20% than the conventional methods.

The surgical usage of Mixed Reality (MR) has received growing attention in areas such as surgical navigation systems, skill assessment, and robot-assisted surgeries. For such applications, pose estimation for hand and surgical instruments from an egocentric perspective is a fundamental task and has been studied extensively in the computer vision field in recent years. However, the development of this field has been impeded by a lack of datasets, especially in the surgical field, where bloody gloves and reflective metallic tools make it hard to obtain 3D pose annotations for hands and objects using conventional methods. To address this issue, we propose POV-Surgery, a large-scale, synthetic, egocentric dataset focusing on pose estimation for hands with different surgical gloves and three orthopedic surgical instruments, namely scalpel, friem, and diskplacer. Our dataset consists of 53 sequences and 88,329 frames, featuring high-resolution RGB-D video streams with activity annotations, accurate 3D and 2D annotations for hand-object pose, and 2D hand-object segmentation masks. We fine-tune the current SOTA methods on POV-Surgery and further show the generalizability when applying to real-life cases with surgical gloves and tools by extensive evaluations. The code and the dataset are publicly available at batfacewayne.github.io/POV_Surgery_io/.

Accurate 3D human keypoints localization is a critical technology enabling robots to achieve natural and safe physical interaction with users. Conventional 3D human keypoints estimation methods primarily focus on the whole-body reconstruction quality relative to the root joint. However, in practical human-robot interaction (HRI) scenarios, robots are more concerned with the precise metric-scale spatial localization of task-relevant body parts under the egocentric camera 3D coordinate. We propose TAIHRI, the first Vision-Language Model (VLM) tailored for close-range HRI perception, capable of understanding users' motion commands and directing the robot's attention to the most task-relevant keypoints. By quantizing 3D keypoints into a finite interaction space, TAIHRI precisely localize the 3D spatial coordinates of critical body parts by 2D keypoint reasoning via next token prediction, and seamlessly adapt to downstream tasks such as natural language control or global space human mesh recovery. Experiments on egocentric interaction benchmarks demonstrate that TAIHRI achieves superior estimation accuracy for task-critical body parts. We believe TAIHRI opens new research avenues in the field of embodied human-robot interaction. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tencent/TAIHRI.

We present WUKONG, a novel training-free framework for high-fidelity textured 3D morphing that takes a pair of source and target prompts (image or text) as input. Unlike conventional methods -- which rely on manual correspondence matching and deformation trajectory estimation (limiting generalization and requiring costly preprocessing) -- WUKONG leverages the generative prior of flow-based transformers to produce high-fidelity 3D transitions with rich texture details. To ensure smooth shape transitions, we exploit the inherent continuity of flow-based generative processes and formulate morphing as an optimal transport barycenter problem. We further introduce a sequential initialization strategy to prevent abrupt geometric distortions and preserve identity coherence. For faithful texture preservation, we propose a similarity-guided semantic consistency mechanism that selectively retains high-frequency details and enables precise control over blending dynamics. This avoids common artifacts like oversmoothing while maintaining semantic fidelity. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that WUKONG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior results across diverse geometry and texture variations.

Policy gradient methods are reinforcement learning algorithms that adapt a parameterized policy by following a performance gradient estimate. Conventional policy gradient methods use Monte-Carlo techniques to estimate the gradient, which tend to have high variance, requiring many samples and resulting in slow convergence. We first propose a Bayesian framework for policy gradient, based on modeling the policy gradient as a Gaussian process. This reduces the number of samples needed to obtain accurate gradient estimates. Moreover, estimates of the natural gradient and a measure of the uncertainty in the gradient estimates, namely, the gradient covariance, are provided at little extra cost. Since the proposed framework considers system trajectories as its basic observable unit, it does not require the dynamics within trajectories to be of any particular form, and can be extended to partially observable problems. On the downside, it cannot exploit the Markov property when the system is Markovian. To address this, we supplement our Bayesian policy gradient framework with a new actor-critic learning model in which a Bayesian class of non-parametric critics, based on Gaussian process temporal difference learning, is used. Such critics model the action-value function as a Gaussian process, allowing Bayes rule to be used to compute the posterior distribution over action-value functions, conditioned on the observed data. Appropriate choices of the policy parameterization and of the prior covariance (kernel) between action-values yield closed-form expressions for the posterior of the gradient of the expected return with respect to the policy parameters. We perform detailed experimental comparisons of the proposed Bayesian policy gradient and actor-critic algorithms with classic Monte-Carlo based policy gradient methods, on a number of reinforcement learning problems.

Reinforcement learning applied to large language models (LLMs) for reasoning tasks is often bottlenecked by unstable gradient estimates due to fixed and uniform sampling of responses across prompts. Prior work such as GVM-RAFT addresses this by dynamically allocating inference budget per prompt to minimize stochastic gradient variance under a budget constraint. Inspired by this insight, we propose Reinforce-Ada, an adaptive sampling framework for online RL post-training of LLMs that continuously reallocates sampling effort to the prompts with the greatest uncertainty or learning potential. Unlike conventional two-stage allocation methods, Reinforce-Ada interleaves estimation and sampling in an online successive elimination process, and automatically stops sampling for a prompt once sufficient signal is collected. To stabilize updates, we form fixed-size groups with enforced reward diversity and compute advantage baselines using global statistics aggregated over the adaptive sampling phase. Empirical results across multiple model architectures and reasoning benchmarks show that Reinforce-Ada accelerates convergence and improves final performance compared to GRPO, especially when using the balanced sampling variant. Our work highlights the central role of variance-aware, adaptive data curation in enabling efficient and reliable reinforcement learning for reasoning-capable LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/RLHFlow/Reinforce-Ada.

In recent years, researchers have focused on reducing the model size and number of computations (measured as "multiply-accumulate" or MAC operations) of DNNs. The energy consumption of a DNN depends on both the number of MAC operations and the energy efficiency of each MAC operation. The former can be estimated at design time; however, the latter depends on the intricate data reuse patterns and underlying hardware architecture. Hence, estimating it at design time is challenging. This work shows that the conventional approach to estimate the data reuse, viz. arithmetic intensity, does not always correctly estimate the degree of data reuse in DNNs since it gives equal importance to all the data types. We propose a novel model, termed "data type aware weighted arithmetic intensity" (DI), which accounts for the unequal importance of different data types in DNNs. We evaluate our model on 25 state-of-the-art DNNs on two GPUs. We show that our model accurately models data-reuse for all possible data reuse patterns for different types of convolution and different types of layers. We show that our model is a better indicator of the energy efficiency of DNNs. We also show its generality using the central limit theorem.

It is well-known that if a network aims to learn how to deblur, it should understand the blur process. Blurring is naturally caused by the convolution of the sharp image with the blur kernel. Thus, allowing the network to learn the blur process in the kernel-level can significantly improve the image deblurring performance. But, current deep networks are still at the pixel-level learning stage, either performing end-to-end pixel-level restoration or stage-wise pseudo kernel-level restoration, failing to enable the deblur model to understand the essence of the blur. To this end, we propose Fourier Kernel Estimator (FKE), which considers the activation operation in Fourier space and converts the convolution problem in the spatial domain to a multiplication problem in Fourier space. Our FKE, jointly optimized with the deblur model, enables the network to learn the kernel-level blur process with low complexity and without any additional supervision. Furthermore, we change the convolution object of the kernel from ``image" to network extracted ``feature", whose rich semantic and structural information is more suitable to blur process learning. With the convolution of the feature and the estimated kernel, our model can learn the essence of blur in kernel-level. To further improve the efficiency of feature extraction, we design a decoupled multi-scale architecture with multiple hierarchical sub-unets with a reversible strategy, which allows better multi-scale encoding and decoding in low training memory. Extensive experiments indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art motion deblurring results and show potential for handling other kernel-related problems. Analysis also shows our kernel estimator is able to learn physically meaningful kernels. The code will be available at https://github.com/DeepMed-Lab-ECNU/Single-Image-Deblur.

We present PiLoT, a unified framework that tackles UAV-based ego and target geo-localization. Conventional approaches rely on decoupled pipelines that fuse GNSS and Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) for ego-pose estimation, and active sensors like laser rangefinders for target localization. However, these methods are susceptible to failure in GNSS-denied environments and incur substantial hardware costs and complexity. PiLoT breaks this paradigm by directly registering live video stream against a geo-referenced 3D map. To achieve robust, accurate, and real-time performance, we introduce three key contributions: 1) a Dual-Thread Engine that decouples map rendering from core localization thread, ensuring both low latency while maintaining drift-free accuracy; 2) a large-scale synthetic dataset with precise geometric annotations (camera pose, depth maps). This dataset enables the training of a lightweight network that generalizes in a zero-shot manner from simulation to real data; and 3) a Joint Neural-Guided Stochastic-Gradient Optimizer (JNGO) that achieves robust convergence even under aggressive motion. Evaluations on a comprehensive set of public and newly collected benchmarks show that PiLoT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while running over 25 FPS on NVIDIA Jetson Orin platform. Our code and dataset is available at: https://github.com/Choyaa/PiLoT.

We introduce 3DEgo to address a novel problem of directly synthesizing photorealistic 3D scenes from monocular videos guided by textual prompts. Conventional methods construct a text-conditioned 3D scene through a three-stage process, involving pose estimation using Structure-from-Motion (SfM) libraries like COLMAP, initializing the 3D model with unedited images, and iteratively updating the dataset with edited images to achieve a 3D scene with text fidelity. Our framework streamlines the conventional multi-stage 3D editing process into a single-stage workflow by overcoming the reliance on COLMAP and eliminating the cost of model initialization. We apply a diffusion model to edit video frames prior to 3D scene creation by incorporating our designed noise blender module for enhancing multi-view editing consistency, a step that does not require additional training or fine-tuning of T2I diffusion models. 3DEgo utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting to create 3D scenes from the multi-view consistent edited frames, capitalizing on the inherent temporal continuity and explicit point cloud data. 3DEgo demonstrates remarkable editing precision, speed, and adaptability across a variety of video sources, as validated by extensive evaluations on six datasets, including our own prepared GS25 dataset. Project Page: https://3dego.github.io/

Coral reefs are declining worldwide due to climate change and local stressors. To inform effective conservation or restoration, monitoring at the highest possible spatial and temporal resolution is necessary. Conventional coral reef surveying methods are limited in scalability due to their reliance on expert labor time, motivating the use of computer vision tools to automate the identification and abundance estimation of live corals from images. However, the design and evaluation of such tools has been impeded by the lack of large high quality datasets. We release the Coralscapes dataset, the first general-purpose dense semantic segmentation dataset for coral reefs, covering 2075 images, 39 benthic classes, and 174k segmentation masks annotated by experts. Coralscapes has a similar scope and the same structure as the widely used Cityscapes dataset for urban scene segmentation, allowing benchmarking of semantic segmentation models in a new challenging domain which requires expert knowledge to annotate. We benchmark a wide range of semantic segmentation models, and find that transfer learning from Coralscapes to existing smaller datasets consistently leads to state-of-the-art performance. Coralscapes will catalyze research on efficient, scalable, and standardized coral reef surveying methods based on computer vision, and holds the potential to streamline the development of underwater ecological robotics.

Accurate ocean modeling and coastal hazard prediction depend on high-resolution bathymetric data; yet, current worldwide datasets are too coarse for exact numerical simulations. While recent deep learning advances have improved earth observation data resolution, existing methods struggle with the unique challenges of producing detailed ocean floor maps, especially in maintaining physical structure consistency and quantifying uncertainties. This work presents a novel uncertainty-aware mechanism using spatial blocks to efficiently capture local bathymetric complexity based on block-based conformal prediction. Using the Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) architecture, the integration of this uncertainty quantification framework yields spatially adaptive confidence estimates while preserving topographical features via discrete latent representations. With smaller uncertainty widths in well-characterized areas and appropriately larger bounds in areas of complex seafloor structures, the block-based design adapts uncertainty estimates to local bathymetric complexity. Compared to conventional techniques, experimental results over several ocean regions show notable increases in both reconstruction quality and uncertainty estimation reliability. This framework increases the reliability of bathymetric reconstructions by preserving structural integrity while offering spatially adaptive uncertainty estimates, so opening the path for more solid climate modeling and coastal hazard assessment.

Auto white balance (AWB) is applied by camera hardware at capture time to remove the color cast caused by the scene illumination. The vast majority of white-balance algorithms assume a single light source illuminates the scene; however, real scenes often have mixed lighting conditions. This paper presents an effective AWB method to deal with such mixed-illuminant scenes. A unique departure from conventional AWB, our method does not require illuminant estimation, as is the case in traditional camera AWB modules. Instead, our method proposes to render the captured scene with a small set of predefined white-balance settings. Given this set of rendered images, our method learns to estimate weighting maps that are used to blend the rendered images to generate the final corrected image. Through extensive experiments, we show this proposed method produces promising results compared to other alternatives for single- and mixed-illuminant scene color correction. Our source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/mahmoudnafifi/mixedillWB.

We introduce ReplaceMe, a generalized training-free depth pruning method that effectively replaces transformer blocks with a linear operation, while maintaining high performance for low compression ratios. In contrast to conventional pruning approaches that require additional training or fine-tuning, our approach requires only a small calibration dataset that is used to estimate a linear transformation, which approximates the pruned blocks. The estimated linear mapping can be seamlessly merged with the remaining transformer blocks, eliminating the need for any additional network parameters. Our experiments show that ReplaceMe consistently outperforms other training-free approaches and remains highly competitive with state-of-the-art pruning methods that involve extensive retraining/fine-tuning and architectural modifications. Applied to several large language models (LLMs), ReplaceMe achieves up to 25\% pruning while retaining approximately 90\% of the original model's performance on open benchmarks - without any training or healing steps, resulting in minimal computational overhead. We provide an open-source library implementing ReplaceMe alongside several state-of-the-art depth pruning techniques, available at https://github.com/mts-ai/ReplaceMe

On-demand ride-sharing platforms face the fundamental challenge of dynamically bundling passengers with diverse origins and destinations and matching them with vehicles in real time, all under significant uncertainty. Recently, MARL has emerged as a promising solution for this problem, leveraging decentralized learning to address the curse of dimensionality caused by the large number of agents in the ride-hailing market and the resulting expansive state and action spaces. However, conventional MARL-based ride-sharing approaches heavily rely on the accurate estimation of Q-values or V-values, which becomes problematic in large-scale, highly uncertain environments. Specifically, most of these approaches adopt an independent paradigm, exacerbating this issue, as each agent treats others as part of the environment, leading to unstable training and substantial estimation bias in value functions. To address these challenges, we propose two novel alternative methods that bypass value function estimation. First, we adapt GRPO to ride-sharing, replacing the PPO baseline with the group average reward to eliminate critic estimation errors and reduce training bias. Second, inspired by GRPO's full utilization of group reward information, we customize the PPO framework for ride-sharing platforms and show that, under a homogeneous fleet, the optimal policy can be trained using only one-step rewards - a method we term One-Step Policy Optimization (OSPO). Experiments on a real-world Manhattan ride-hailing dataset demonstrate that both GRPO and OSPO achieve superior performance across most scenarios, efficiently optimizing pickup times and the number of served orders using simple MLP networks.

Large language models (LLMs) have captured significant interest from both academia and industry due to their impressive performance across various textual tasks. However, the potential of LLMs to analyze physiological time-series data remains an emerging research field. Particularly, there is a notable gap in the utilization of LLMs for analyzing wearable biosignals to achieve cuffless blood pressure (BP) measurement, which is critical for the management of cardiovascular diseases. This paper presents the first work to explore the capacity of LLMs to perform cuffless BP estimation based on wearable biosignals. We extracted physiological features from electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals and designed context-enhanced prompts by combining these features with BP domain knowledge and user information. Subsequently, we adapted LLMs to BP estimation tasks through fine-tuning. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conducted assessments of ten advanced LLMs using a comprehensive public dataset of wearable biosignals from 1,272 participants. The experimental results demonstrate that the optimally fine-tuned LLM significantly surpasses conventional task-specific baselines, achieving an estimation error of 0.00 pm 9.25 mmHg for systolic BP and 1.29 pm 6.37 mmHg for diastolic BP. Notably, the ablation studies highlight the benefits of our context enhancement strategy, leading to an 8.9% reduction in mean absolute error for systolic BP estimation. This paper pioneers the exploration of LLMs for cuffless BP measurement, providing a potential solution to enhance the accuracy of cuffless BP measurement.

We present VisionLLM v2, an end-to-end generalist multimodal large model (MLLM) that unifies visual perception, understanding, and generation within a single framework. Unlike traditional MLLMs limited to text output, VisionLLM v2 significantly broadens its application scope. It excels not only in conventional visual question answering (VQA) but also in open-ended, cross-domain vision tasks such as object localization, pose estimation, and image generation and editing. To this end, we propose a new information transmission mechanism termed "super link", as a medium to connect MLLM with task-specific decoders. It not only allows flexible transmission of task information and gradient feedback between the MLLM and multiple downstream decoders but also effectively resolves training conflicts in multi-tasking scenarios. In addition, to support the diverse range of tasks, we carefully collected and combed training data from hundreds of public vision and vision-language tasks. In this way, our model can be joint-trained end-to-end on hundreds of vision language tasks and generalize to these tasks using a set of shared parameters through different user prompts, achieving performance comparable to task-specific models. We believe VisionLLM v2 will offer a new perspective on the generalization of MLLMs.

LiDAR scene flow is the task of estimating per-point 3D motion between consecutive point clouds. Recent methods achieve centimeter-level accuracy on popular autonomous vehicle (AV) datasets, but are typically only trained and evaluated on a single sensor. In this paper, we aim to learn general motion priors that transfer to diverse and unseen LiDAR sensors. However, prior work in LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection demonstrate that naively training on multiple datasets yields worse performance than single dataset models. Interestingly, we find that this conventional wisdom does not hold for motion estimation, and that state-of-the-art scene flow methods greatly benefit from cross-dataset training without architectural modification. We posit that low-level tasks such as motion estimation may be less sensitive to sensor configuration; indeed, our analysis shows that models trained on fast-moving objects (e.g., from highway datasets) perform well on fast-moving objects, even across different datasets. Informed by our analysis, we propose UniFlow, a feedforward model that unifies and trains on multiple large-scale LiDAR scene flow datasets with diverse sensor placements and point cloud densities. Our frustratingly simple solution establishes a new state-of-the-art on Waymo and nuScenes, improving over prior work by 5.1% and 35.2% respectively. Moreover, UniFlow achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on unseen datasets like TruckScenes and AEVAScenes, outperforming prior dataset-specific models by 30.1% and 22.5% respectively.

Camera-LiDAR extrinsic calibration is a critical task for multi-sensor fusion in autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles and mobile robots. Traditional techniques often require manual intervention or specific environments, making them labour-intensive and error-prone. Existing deep learning-based self-calibration methods focus on small realignments and still rely on initial estimates, limiting their practicality. In this paper, we present PseudoCal, a novel self-calibration method that overcomes these limitations by leveraging the pseudo-LiDAR concept and working directly in the 3D space instead of limiting itself to the camera field of view. In typical autonomous vehicle and robotics contexts and conventions, PseudoCal is able to perform one-shot calibration quasi-independently of initial parameter estimates, addressing extreme cases that remain unsolved by existing approaches.

We introduce LDL, a fast and robust algorithm that localizes a panorama to a 3D map using line segments. LDL focuses on the sparse structural information of lines in the scene, which is robust to illumination changes and can potentially enable efficient computation. While previous line-based localization approaches tend to sacrifice accuracy or computation time, our method effectively observes the holistic distribution of lines within panoramic images and 3D maps. Specifically, LDL matches the distribution of lines with 2D and 3D line distance functions, which are further decomposed along principal directions of lines to increase the expressiveness. The distance functions provide coarse pose estimates by comparing the distributional information, where the poses are further optimized using conventional local feature matching. As our pipeline solely leverages line geometry and local features, it does not require costly additional training of line-specific features or correspondence matching. Nevertheless, our method demonstrates robust performance on challenging scenarios including object layout changes, illumination shifts, and large-scale scenes, while exhibiting fast pose search terminating within a matter of milliseconds. We thus expect our method to serve as a practical solution for line-based localization, and complement the well-established point-based paradigm. The code for LDL is available through the following link: https://github.com/82magnolia/panoramic-localization.

In standard autoregressive generation, an LLM predicts the next-token distribution, samples a discrete token, and then discards the distribution, passing only the sampled token as new input. To preserve this distribution's rich information, we propose Mixture of Inputs (MoI), a training-free method for autoregressive generation. After generating a token following the standard paradigm, we construct a new input that blends the generated discrete token with the previously discarded token distribution. Specifically, we employ a Bayesian estimation method that treats the token distribution as the prior, the sampled token as the observation, and replaces the conventional one-hot vector with the continuous posterior expectation as the new model input. MoI allows the model to maintain a richer internal representation throughout the generation process, resulting in improved text quality and reasoning capabilities. On mathematical reasoning, code generation, and PhD-level QA tasks, MoI consistently improves performance across multiple models including QwQ-32B, Nemotron-Super-49B, Gemma-3-27B, and DAPO-Qwen-32B, with no additional training and negligible computational overhead.

Event cameras have the ability to record continuous and detailed trajectories of objects with high temporal resolution, thereby providing intuitive motion cues for optical flow estimation. Nevertheless, most existing learning-based approaches for event optical flow estimation directly remould the paradigm of conventional images by representing the consecutive event stream as static frames, ignoring the inherent temporal continuity of event data. In this paper, we argue that temporal continuity is a vital element of event-based optical flow and propose a novel Temporal Motion Aggregation (TMA) approach to unlock its potential. Technically, TMA comprises three components: an event splitting strategy to incorporate intermediate motion information underlying the temporal context, a linear lookup strategy to align temporally fine-grained motion features and a novel motion pattern aggregation module to emphasize consistent patterns for motion feature enhancement. By incorporating temporally fine-grained motion information, TMA can derive better flow estimates than existing methods at early stages, which not only enables TMA to obtain more accurate final predictions, but also greatly reduces the demand for a number of refinements. Extensive experiments on DSEC-Flow and MVSEC datasets verify the effectiveness and superiority of our TMA. Remarkably, compared to E-RAFT, TMA achieves a 6\% improvement in accuracy and a 40\% reduction in inference time on DSEC-Flow. Code will be available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/TMA.

Score-based diffusion models generate samples from an unknown target distribution using a time-reversed diffusion process. While such models represent state-of-the-art approaches in industrial applications such as artificial image generation, it has recently been noted that their performance can be further improved by considering injection noise with heavy tailed characteristics. Here, I present a generalization of generative diffusion processes to a wide class of non-Gaussian noise processes. I consider forward processes driven by standard Gaussian noise with super-imposed Poisson jumps representing a finite activity Levy process. The generative process is shown to be governed by a generalized score function that depends on the jump amplitude distribution and can be estimated by minimizing a simple MSE loss as in conventional Gaussian models. Both probability flow ODE and SDE formulations are derived using basic technical effort. A detailed implementation for a pure jump process with Laplace distributed amplitudes yields a generalized score function in closed analytical form and is shown to outperform the equivalent Gaussian model in specific parameter regimes.

Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable progress in synthesizing high-quality images from text prompts, which boosts researches on prompt-based image editing that edits a source image according to a target prompt. Despite their advances, existing methods still encounter three key issues: 1) limited capacity of the text prompt in guiding target image generation, 2) insufficient mining of word-to-patch and patch-to-patch relationships for grounding editing areas, and 3) unified editing strength for all regions during each denoising step. To address these issues, we present a Vision-guided and Mask-enhanced Adaptive Editing (ViMAEdit) method with three key novel designs. First, we propose to leverage image embeddings as explicit guidance to enhance the conventional textual prompt-based denoising process, where a CLIP-based target image embedding estimation strategy is introduced. Second, we devise a self-attention-guided iterative editing area grounding strategy, which iteratively exploits patch-to-patch relationships conveyed by self-attention maps to refine those word-to-patch relationships contained in cross-attention maps. Last, we present a spatially adaptive variance-guided sampling, which highlights sampling variances for critical image regions to promote the editing capability. Experimental results demonstrate the superior editing capacity of ViMAEdit over all existing methods.

We introduce HOSNeRF, a novel 360{\deg} free-viewpoint rendering method that reconstructs neural radiance fields for dynamic human-object-scene from a single monocular in-the-wild video. Our method enables pausing the video at any frame and rendering all scene details (dynamic humans, objects, and backgrounds) from arbitrary viewpoints. The first challenge in this task is the complex object motions in human-object interactions, which we tackle by introducing the new object bones into the conventional human skeleton hierarchy to effectively estimate large object deformations in our dynamic human-object model. The second challenge is that humans interact with different objects at different times, for which we introduce two new learnable object state embeddings that can be used as conditions for learning our human-object representation and scene representation, respectively. Extensive experiments show that HOSNeRF significantly outperforms SOTA approaches on two challenging datasets by a large margin of 40% ~ 50% in terms of LPIPS. The code, data, and compelling examples of 360{\deg} free-viewpoint renderings from single videos will be released in https://showlab.github.io/HOSNeRF.

Collocating deep learning training tasks improves GPU utilization but causes drastic slowdowns due to resource contention and risks Out-of-Memory (OOM) failures. Accurate memory estimation is essential for robust collocation, while GPU utilization -- a key proxy for resource contention -- enables interference-aware scheduling to reduce slowdowns and improve throughput. Existing GPU memory estimators span three paradigms -- analytical models, CPU-side libraries, and ML-based estimators -- each with distinct limitations: dependence on detailed model specifications, intrusive integration, poor generalization, and varying latency overhead. GPU heterogeneity further complicates estimation, as identical tasks can exhibit markedly different memory footprints across hardware generations. GPU utilization remains comparatively understudied, further complicated by the non-additive nature of utilization metrics and hardware sensitivity. We conduct a systematic analysis of representative estimators from each paradigm -- Horus, PyTorch FakeTensor, and our lightweight ML-based estimator -- evaluating accuracy, generalizability, and practical overhead. We construct a synthetic dataset spanning MLPs, CNNs, and Transformers with controlled architectural variations, and train MLP- and Transformer-based estimators for memory prediction. We further experiment with utilization estimation on the same dataset. Our evaluation reveals key tradeoffs and validates estimators against real-world unseen models. Significant challenges remain: analytical models are hardware-dependent, CPU-side libraries impose intrusive integration costs, and ML-based estimators struggle with cross-architecture generalization. We release all datasets, tools, and artifacts to support further research.

Predicting neural architecture performance is a challenging task and is crucial to neural architecture design and search. Existing approaches either rely on neural performance predictors which are limited to modeling architectures in a predefined design space involving specific sets of operators and connection rules, and cannot generalize to unseen architectures, or resort to zero-cost proxies which are not always accurate. In this paper, we propose GENNAPE, a Generalized Neural Architecture Performance Estimator, which is pretrained on open neural architecture benchmarks, and aims to generalize to completely unseen architectures through combined innovations in network representation, contrastive pretraining, and fuzzy clustering-based predictor ensemble. Specifically, GENNAPE represents a given neural network as a Computation Graph (CG) of atomic operations which can model an arbitrary architecture. It first learns a graph encoder via Contrastive Learning to encourage network separation by topological features, and then trains multiple predictor heads, which are soft-aggregated according to the fuzzy membership of a neural network. Experiments show that GENNAPE pretrained on NAS-Bench-101 can achieve superior transferability to 5 different public neural network benchmarks, including NAS-Bench-201, NAS-Bench-301, MobileNet and ResNet families under no or minimum fine-tuning. We further introduce 3 challenging newly labelled neural network benchmarks: HiAML, Inception and Two-Path, which can concentrate in narrow accuracy ranges. Extensive experiments show that GENNAPE can correctly discern high-performance architectures in these families. Finally, when paired with a search algorithm, GENNAPE can find architectures that improve accuracy while reducing FLOPs on three families.

There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training data, learning under privacy constraints, or even heavy-tailed noise due to the dynamics of the algorithm itself. Here we study SGD with robust gradient estimators based on estimating the median. We first consider computing the median gradient across samples, and show that the resulting method can converge even under heavy-tailed, state-dependent noise. We then derive iterative methods based on the stochastic proximal point method for computing the geometric median and generalizations thereof. Finally we propose an algorithm estimating the median gradient across iterations, and find that several well known methods - in particular different forms of clipping - are particular cases of this framework.

We model Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) token routing as a congestion game with a single effective parameter, the congestion coefficient gamma_eff, that quantifies the balance-quality tradeoff. Tracking gamma_eff across training checkpoints of two open-source MoE models, OLMoE-1B-7B (20 checkpoints, with dense sampling in the surge region) and OpenMoE-8B (6 checkpoints), reveals a three-phase trajectory: a surge phase where the router learns to balance load (gamma_eff: 14 to 36-39, peaking in the step 30K-40K region), a stabilization phase where experts specialize under steady balance (B_0: 2.4 to 2.3, steps 100K-400K), and a relaxation phase where the router trades balance for quality as experts differentiate (gamma_eff: 27 to 9, steps 400K-1.2M). This non-monotone trajectory, invisible to post-hoc analysis of converged models, reveals that early MoE training prioritizes balance while late training prioritizes quality. The theoretical framework is honest about its limits: the single-type equilibrium reduces to temperature-scaled softmax (held-out L1: MFG = 0.199 vs. softmax = 0.200). The game is not a better predictor; it reveals what the temperature means and, critically, how that temperature evolves. We complement the dynamics with an effective congestion decomposition, a multi-type extension that improves load prediction via token clustering on all 16 layers (mean: 30%), scope diagnostics (K/M, epsilon_l), and robustness verification across four independent quality estimators (r >= 0.89). All confidence intervals are from bootstrap resampling over 50 independent text batches.