Detecting pretraining data in large language models is challenging because high likelihood can reflect either training exposure or strong generalization. In the joint space of prediction loss and predictive entropy, a likelihood-only detector uses a horizontal boundary and can mistake predictable non-members for members. Motivated by this, we introduce an inclined boundary that evaluates prediction loss relative to predictive entropy. Our analysis shows that entropy correction can preserve the expected membership signal while reducing its variance, thereby improving standardized member--non-member separation. We further extend the mean--variance analysis to the more general setting with a nonzero mean entropy gap. Interestingly, this entropy-adjusted score admits a Helmholtz free-energy interpretation, leading to Energy Transfer Detection (ETD), which views pretraining data detection from a macroscopic residual free-energy transfer perspective. Extensive experiments show that ETD achieves the best average detection performance, improving average AUROC by up to 3.5\% and TPR@5\%FPR by up to 5.1\%, while remaining robust across diverse settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21888
The gold standard datasets for mapping connectomes are electron microscopy volumes of densely labeled neural tissue at nanometer resolution. Yet reconstructing and proofreading neuronal arbors and annotating all synapses requires pipelining multiple software tools that are often fragmented, inconsistently maintained, or proprietary, hindering reproducibility and automation. Here, we introduce Catena, an open-source, comprehensive, developer-centric software suite for connectomics that integrates modules for 3D neuron and organelle segmentation, synapse detection, microtubule tracking, and neurotransmitter inference. Catena organizes its modules in composable, chunk-wise processing pipelines in a completely documented, extensible, and adaptable design. We further reduce compute and ground-truth data requirements with pretrained machine learning models, facilitating fine-tuning. Catena ships fully containerized modules that encapsulate evolving dependencies for consistent execution across workstations and clusters. By consolidating open components, shareable models, and containerized runtimes, Catena delivers a reproducible and scalable approach to mapping cellular connectomes from electron microscopy volumes. Code and documentation: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21887
Air-ground autonomy becomes harder when the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) must remain observable by a gimbal light detection and ranging (LiDAR) mounted on the unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The platforms must avoid dynamic obstacles while coordinating heterogeneous motion, limited sensing, and changing task initiative within one closed loop. This paper presents VIRGA, a neural geometric coordination framework that turns dual-LiDAR observations into bounded source-specific Riemannian fields and couples them through a virtual agent with reciprocal elastic feedback. Platform-aware execution maps convert the shared coordination reference into feasible UAV, UGV, and gimbal commands while enforcing active-observation safeguards. Evaluation against three complementary baselines reveals distinct limitations. An adapted Ray-RMP controller provides the fastest Riemannian response but produces insufficient clearance in the coupled air-ground task. A dense analytical Riemannian field improves geometric avoidance, yet its high evaluation cost prevents stable field-of-view maintenance. An adapted ColAG controller achieves the lowest latency but still incurs safety and observability violations. VIRGA completes all paired warehouse conditions safely, while a long-range cave stress test without retraining demonstrates sustained coordination in irregular and confined geometry. Ablations confirm contributions from online geometric evaluation, virtual-agent mediation, and reciprocal feedback.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21883
Nearly 90% of drugs entering clinical development ultimately fail, despite billions of dollars in investment. Pharmaceutical companies therefore rely on clinical development planning (CDP) and probability of technical and regulatory success assessment to anticipate development risks, yet these decisions remain labor-intensive and subjective, requiring experts across clinical science, statistics, regulatory affairs, and competitive intelligence to jointly acquire, synthesize, and reason over heterogeneous evidence. Here, we introduce TrialAtlas, a memory-augmented multi-agent research organization for CDP that mirrors this collaborative process by coordinating specialized agents for literature synthesis, competitive trial intelligence, regulatory precedent analysis, and integrated reasoning over trial design and development risk. TrialAtlas further learns from historical clinical trials and regulatory outcomes, including prior New Drug Applications (NDAs), to ground its decisions in accumulated development experience. To evaluate these capabilities in an authentic regulatory setting, we introduce TrialAtlasBench, constructed from 291 FDA Complete Response Letters and spanning three practical tasks: detecting trial design deficiencies, recommending actionable design improvements, and predicting technical and regulatory success. TrialAtlas achieves an F1 score of 50.0% for deficiency detection, outperforming the strongest baseline by 6.1 points, and reaches 85.3% balanced accuracy and 84.7% F1 for prediction of technical and regulatory success, improving over the best baselines by 6.7 points in balanced accuracy and 12.0 points in Cohen's kappa. In expert evaluation, 86.4% of TrialAtlas-generated concerns were judged valid, compared with 83.1% for OpenAI DeepResearch and 59.3% for Gemini DeepResearch.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21859
While object detection has advanced through improved architectures and open-vocabulary models, we provide strong evidence that benchmark quality is limited by annotation incompleteness. Across four widely used datasets (COCO, Pascal VOC, Cityscapes, KITTI), re-annotation reveals substantial increases in annotated objects (e.g., up to +60% on KITTI and +40% on COCO), driven primarily by previously unlabeled small, occluded, or densely packed instances. While some differences arise from dataset-specific annotation conventions, we consistently find that missing annotations are the main source of label errors across all datasets. To achieve high data quality, we introduce a scalable annotation pipeline that emphasizes high recall and captures ambiguity through soft labels aggregated from at least 11 annotators per object. The resulting annotations improve coverage and align well with human calibration. We show that benchmark performance is highly sensitive to annotation quality, although model rankings remain largely stable. We introduce two large-scale benchmarks: (i) an uncertainty-aware object detection benchmark, and (ii) a label error detection benchmark grounded in real label errors. We show that current detectors are strongly depended on annotation quality and are misaligned with human perception. Current label error detection methods, which have been shown to perform well on synthetic noise, struggle to achieve high recall and precision on real label errors. Our results highlight the need for future object detection benchmarks to move beyond deterministic annotations toward high-recall, uncertainty-aware evaluation that maximizes valid instances and better reflects real-world ambiguity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21822
We study how far a simple statistical pipeline can go on univariate time series anomaly detection under a strict selection protocol. The method extracts a small pool of statistics over sliding windows, scores each window with a transductive robust (MAD) model, and selects a feature subset per domain on a held-out tuning split. On TSB-AD-U it reaches $0.529$ per-series VUS-PR, above the best neural ($0.45$) and statistical ($0.44$) entries on the public leaderboard and within $0.06$ of the strongest pretrained foundation model, several of which use more supervision than ours. Ablations locate the cause: across three selection strategies and a hindsight oracle the score moves by $0.031$, and across the aggregation grid by $0.096$, while changing the candidate pool moves it by $0.226$. The candidate pool sets the ceiling; the search over it is second-order. We therefore generate a pool per domain by prompting a multimodal LLM with in-context example windows from that domain. The generated pools match the hand-crafted one under matched selection, and the two cover different domains: selecting over their union improves on the generated pool in all twelve generator-seed pairs and lifts the pipeline to $0.588$, matching the performance of the best entry on the leaderboard.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21801
Traditional unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods are designed to flag or localise deviations from a normative distribution, ignoring the underlying generative mechanisms of the anomalies. Yet the nature of an anomaly is often as important as its presence. We reformulate UAD as a Bayesian inverse problem, in which the objective is to infer the most probable corruption responsible for each observation. Our framework yields a probabilistic anomaly score as the energy of the inferred corruption parameters, and serves as a principled recipe for developing new UAD algorithms. We derive several existing methods as instances of the general framework, each corresponding to the same energy score under different modelling choices. Experimentally, we study the framework's components in a controlled setting, and improve object-class AUROC on the MVTec AD dataset by 2.3% by adapting the underlying corruption model. Finally, we validate the framework on a brain MRI benchmark, achieving strong detection performance while producing estimates of pathology intensity, bias, and geometry. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21800
3D object detection from LiDAR point clouds faces a fundamental dilemma: voxel-based methods achieve efficiency at the cost of geometric quantization, while point-based methods preserve fidelity but suffer from prohibitive computational bottlenecks. Specifically, point-based architectures are crippled by slow downsampling strategies (e.g., FPS) and expensive dynamic neighbor queries (e.g., k-NN) coupled with costly continuous interactions. To tackle these systemic inefficiencies, we propose PointLAM, a highly efficient and powerful point-based architecture driven by two synergistic innovations. First, to resolve the downsampling bottleneck, we develop the Laplacian Point Sampler (LPS). LPS employs an implicit discrete Laplacian high-pass filter and Doubly Sorted Sampling to achieve fast, structure-aware foreground preservation. Second, to overcome local modeling latency, we design the Local Hadamard Aggregator (LHA). LHA decouples spatial indexing from feature representation using transient grids, and replaces complex continuous interactions with a Hadamard Gating mechanism for topology-aware, attentive modulation. By coupling this local gating with Bi-Directional Mamba (BDM) layers for global sequence modeling, we formulate the Local Attentive Mamba (LAM) block. Powered by this architecture, PointLAM achieves competitive performance on nuScenes and Waymo for point-based detectors. It rivals highly optimized voxel competitors while requiring a fraction of the computational footprint, demonstrating marked superiority in detecting small instances and handling extreme sparsity. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21780
Image registration is a vital preprocessing step in multimodal perception tasks, including image fusion, object detection, and semantic segmentation. In Advanced Driver- Assistance Systems (ADAS), spatial misalignment between visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) cameras -caused by non-coincident optical axes and field-of-view differences- introduces non-uniform parallax and visual ghosting. Classical keypoint-based methods are restricted to global homographies that fail under dynamic depth, while unconstrained dense flow algorithms lack structural regularization and suffer from temporal instability. In this paper, we propose XCalib, an unsupervised dense thermal-visible registration framework that bridges this gap. Rather than serving as an absolute metric calibration tool, XCalib leverages virtual pinhole camera parameterization strictly as a geometric constraint space. By optimizing effective relative pose and intrinsics alongside predicted monocular metric depth, XCalib restricts the search space of spatial displacements to physically valid projection geometries. Our key contributions are: (1) a novel registration paradigm that uses camera parameterization as an implicit regularizer for dense cross-modal warping; (2) Normalized Edges Correlation (NEC), a robust structural similarity metric tailored to cross- spectral alignment; and (3) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across public ADAS datasets, demonstrating superior temporal stability and alignment accuracy over unconstrained dense flow baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21770
We present CRISP (Contact-RIch Simulation Platform), a high-fidelity physics engine tailored for complex multi-contact simulations such as tight-tolerance robotic manipulation. Achieving high physical fidelity in robotic simulation requires both expressive modeling of geometry and contact interactions, as well as accurate numerical resolution via robust collision detection and contact solvers. However, existing simulators often either rely on limited support for geometric representations and simplified modeling of contact interactions, or employ numerical resolution methods whose accuracy or robustness is inherently constrained. Accordingly, we develop a new simulator that supports diverse geometric representations with accurate optimization-based collision detection, and combines contact modeling with robust augmented Lagrangian-based contact solvers. This integration enables efficient and consistent detection of contact information across complex geometries while accurately resolving multi-contact constraints without problematic relaxations, which is essential for simulating contact-intensive and sharp interactions. We validate the physical fidelity of our simulator against state-of-the-art platforms and further demonstrate its capabilities through complex robotic manipulation scenarios. CRISP is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21761
Modern text-to-speech (TTS) systems are rarely deployed as unchanged pre-trained models. They are often adapted through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or preference optimization such as DPO and GRPO. This raises a practical question for audio deepfake forensics: do fingerprints learned from a foundation generator remain valid after adaptation? We present GenTraceBench, a controlled benchmark spanning five TTS architectures, 16 pre-/post-training variants, and 49,728 utterances generated with fixed texts and speaker prompts. Under a train-on-foundation, test-on-adapted protocol, we evaluate binary detection, closed-set attribution, and open-set verification. DPO and GRPO generally preserve fingerprints, whereas some SFT and pre-training-data changes cause substantial drift; effect sizes vary across three forensic backbones. Repeated training runs confirm the largest W2V-BERT attribution drop, while a data-mixture control with comparable speech quality shows that composition change need not cause drift. In W2V-BERT verification, multi-shot enrollment reduces EER for the SFT condition from 44.4% to 11.0%, whereas the SingNet-only condition remains at or above 45% EER.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21738
Chinese social media has generated a vast and continually evolving lexicon of internet buzzwords whose meanings are often non-literal and deeply rooted in local cultural and pragmatic contexts. Existing research has primarily focused on interpreting these buzzwords within Chinese, leaving largely unexplored whether LLMs can transfer such culturally grounded knowledge across languages and accurately convey the intended meanings in English. This cross-lingual capability is also critical for safety, as harmful expressions may obscure their offensive content through culture-specific homophony, euphemism, irony, or coded language. In this paper, we investigate the ability of advanced LLMs to understand Chinese internet buzzwords across languages. To this end, we introduce CIBuzzBench, the first benchmark for cross-lingual Chinese-to-English understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords. CIBuzzBench comprises 3,001 Chinese internet buzzwords annotated with English meaning explanations, English equivalents, category labels, and harmfulness labels. Based on these annotations, we design three evaluation tasks: Meaning Explanation, Cross-lingual Equivalent Matching, and Culturally Grounded Harmfulness Detection. We evaluate representative state-of-the-art proprietary and Chinese LLMs under both English- and Chinese-prompting settings. Our results show that LLMs continue to struggle with the cross-lingual understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords, particularly in fine-grained non-literal interpretation, robust equivalent matching under option perturbations, and calibrated harmfulness detection. These findings highlight the persistent challenges posed by culturally grounded language phenomena for multilingual LLMs and safety-oriented evaluation. The dataset and code are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21722
this http URL is Digital Green's farm advisory service for smallholder farmers. When something looks wrong with a crop, the farmer takes a photograph and sends it, and that photograph is the whole question: no symptom described, no crop named, often no text at all. The service has to determine whether the picture can be used, what crop it shows, and what is wrong with it, from images taken on cheap phones in a field, in poor light and with a moving camera. The system doing this today cannot be adjusted. It has no adjustable thresholds for photograph rejection, crops and problems cannot be added, and there is no confidence cut-off to set. We study about 1.16 million photographs sent to this http URL from Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Nigeria. The production quality gate rejected 46.8% of the images it judged, over a quarter of those reaching diagnosis returned no crop name, and 35.8% of the labelled problems filed under "disease" are pests, identifiable without the crop. We therefore split the work into three stages: a quality gate (M0), a crop detector (M1), and a disease or pest detector (M2). Route A fills all three with one fine-tuned vision-language model (Qwen3-VL-4B) answering in a single call. Route B fills each with a small specialist model (DaViT, YOLO26). We replace our production GPT-4o quality gate with a small MobileNetV3 gate at 86.9% F1 in 12 ms. On one test set scored the same way for every system, a hierarchical DaViT-Base achieves 95.41% crop accuracy against 91.46% for the production baseline. It also leads on diagnosis and never declines to answer, while every language model in the comparison leaves a large share of rows with no diagnosis. The fine-tuned model retains two capabilities the specialists do not have: one call for all three stages, and a request for a better photograph when the image cannot support an answer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21651
Automatic tooth segmentation and FDI numbering on panoramic radiographs underpins computer-assisted dental diagnosis, yet which factors govern performance remains unclear. We assemble a corpus of 1,422 panoramic radiographs containing 42,142 expert-delineated tooth polygons across the 32-class FDI taxonomy, annotated by 30 dental practitioners and independently reviewed by two others, and use it to isolate input resolution, architecture and anatomical priors under a single evaluation protocol. First, resolution dominates: across a controlled 640/1024/1280 ablation, mask mAP50-95 rises 0.656 -> 0.710 -> 0.717 while mAP50 stays flat at ~0.982. Both gains are significant under a paired bootstrap over images (p < 0.001, p = 0.024); neither mAP50 change is distinguishable from zero. Added resolution buys boundary precision, not detection. Second, architecture is nearly irrelevant in-domain: a query-based transformer with 2.1x the parameters is statistically equivalent to a one-stage detector (95% CI [-0.0064, +0.0064]), only marginally better under domain shift, 5.5x slower on CPU and not executable under standard ONNX runtimes. Third, three targeted interventions fail: a LoRA-adapted self-supervised encoder underperforms, a promptable foundation segmenter degrades masks by 39%, and globally optimal anatomical label assignment yields +0.0007 despite correcting a constraint violated in 40% of out-of-domain predictions. Zero-shot transfer to an independent multi-centre cohort, verified overlap-free, costs 62% of mask mAP50-95 but only 18% of mAP50, reproducing the dissociation. Decomposing masks along the tooth axis localises the residual error to the apical third. Boundary precision is therefore the binding constraint, and effort is better directed at resolution and acquisition diversity than at architectural novelty.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21628
Fraudulent job posting detection aims to identify job advertisements that are corrupted either through fake content, misleading information, or negative intent, disrupting the online eco-system of job-seekers and employers. Existing studies in this domain lack effective methods to simultaneously achieve high accuracy and meaningful structure of latent-space representations that capture subtleties among fake posts. To this end, we propose Centroid-Guided Contrastive Loss (CGCL), a loss function which unifies classification with densely formulated clustering to consistently reshape latent-space through a centroid-driven top-$k$ push-and-pull mechanism. The complementary nature of CGCL enables the model to enforce accurate decision boundaries and maintain high clustering compactness, effectively capturing both class separability and latent structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of our method on EMSCAD, a public benchmark dataset. The code associated with this work is available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21599
Monocular 6-DoF pose estimation of non-cooperative targets is important for on-orbit servicing and debris removal. A single-image estimator can confuse near-symmetric spacecraft orientations, and tracking can preserve an incorrect pose. We present Hypothesis-Anchored Tracking (HAT), a causal framework that uses inter-frame motion to select among competing CAD-based pose hypotheses before alignment and fusion. Rather than independently choosing the highest-scoring hypothesis in each image, HAT retains competing orientation histories and selects a pose to anchor the relative trajectory estimated by monocular SLAM. Sparse anchors and pose fusion provide per-frame estimates after initialization without revising past outputs. The method requires only a calibrated RGB sequence, a metric CAD model, and target image regions, which can be supplied by detection or segmentation. The pretrained pose and SLAM networks require no target-specific training or fine-tuning. We evaluate two versions, Mega-HAT and Pico-HAT, using MegaPose and PicoPose, on SPARK-2024, SwissCube and SHIRT, with YCB-Video assessing performance outside the space domain. Using one temporal configuration per method, the arithmetic means of the four dataset-wise comparisons show 9.4% lower mean pose error and 3.76 times the sustained input FPS for Mega-HAT relative to independent MegaPose, and 23.9% lower mean pose error and 2.42 times the FPS for Pico-HAT relative to independent PicoPose. Mega-HAT ablations on SPARK and an offline reference examine component contributions and the effect of revising past estimates.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21597
Four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) records a two-dimensional diffraction pattern at each electron-probe position, yielding spatially resolved reciprocal-space information but large, heterogeneous data volumes. Here we describe 4D-ImageNet, a collection of 174,000 diffraction patterns comprising 145,000 experimental patterns selected from 29 acquisitions and 29,000 multislice simulations. The experimental data cover acquisition-level labels for Ag, Au, mixed Au-Ag, CoO, Pd and ZnO specimens across multiple fields of view, scan dimensions, camera lengths and exposure times. Each acquisition contributes 5,000 quality-ranked patterns with source scan coordinates and acquisition metadata. A set-prediction detector provides model-derived pseudo-labels for the direct-beam position and Bragg-disk centres, with a confidence score for each disk. The simulation data cover 13 crystal structures and include Euler rotations, reciprocal-space sampling and approximate low-index beam directions. A grouped mixed-domain masked-reconstruction benchmark is provided to assess leakage-resistant loading and evaluation across experimental and simulated data. The dataset is intended for representation learning, disk detection, diffraction-pattern retrieval, orientation analysis and simulation-to-experiment studies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21593
Multi-label few-shot learning (MLFSL) remains a significant challenge in medical image analysis (MIA). Current metric-based meta-learning methods face two critical limitations in MIA. First, conventional prototype generation often entangles irrelevant disease information, leading to contaminated prototypes and degraded performance. Second, prior studies typically enforce inter-class separability in embedding space, largely neglecting the inherent correlations among diseases. To overcome these challenges, we propose Prototype Purification and Regulation (PPR), a novel MLFSL framework for MIA. PPR first performs prototype purification by leveraging sample-level comorbidity scores to emphasize disease-specific features, producing purified prototypes that better characterize each disease. Building upon these purified prototypes, PPR further addresses the underexplored problem of inter-class prototype distance in MIA by incorporating disease-level comorbidity statistics to adaptively regulate inter-class similarity, forming a comorbidity-aware embedding space. Overall, PPR sequentially enables the model to capture pure disease features and inter-class relationships for reliable MLFSL in MIA. Extensive experiments across four chest X-ray benchmark datasets, including cross-domain evaluation, show that PPR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving disease detection while demonstrating robust generalization and clinical applicability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21541
Temporal action localization (TAL) in wearable sensor streams identifies action classes and temporal boundaries, enabling finer-grained activity understanding than conventional action recognition. However, training typically requires costly start--end annotations for every action instance. To reduce this burden, we study point-supervised TAL, where each instance is labeled with only one timestamp and its class. We propose Progressive Sensor Event Expansion (PSEE), which combines semantic activations, sensor-specific transition evidence, and adaptive temporal ownership to recover point-supervised pseudo segments. These segments supervise standard TAL detectors without modifying their inference procedures. Cross-subject experiments on four inertial-sensing benchmarks demonstrate improved pseudo-boundary quality over adapted point-supervised baselines, compatibility with different TAL detectors, and robustness to point sampling. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21462
Image steganography hides secret message within normal images, with most existing works relying on cover-preserving transmission. However, such a paradigm becomes vulnerable once the original cover is exposed or can be reliably approximated. In this paper, we propose StyleStegaNet, a stylized image hiding framework that replaces cover matching with style-concealment transmission. Instead of transmitting a cover-like stego image, StyleStegaNet generates stylized stego images conditioned on publicly available style references, redefining steganography invisibility from cover-preserving concealment to behavior-level camouflage based on style transformation. Such a setting poses a substantial challenge to reliable secret recovery, since neural stylization can significantly alter the feature statistics exploited by deep hiding methods. To address this challenge, StyleStegaNet decouples the overall task into four coordinated stages: stego generation, stylized transmission, structure-preserving reconstruction, and secret recovery. Moreover, StyleStegaNet is optimized with a progressive three-stage training strategy, in which wavelet-domain constraints and perceptual supervision guide the recoverable information toward structural representations. We further provide an analysis showing that secret recoverability is largely restricted to the normalized structural subspace, offering a mechanistic explanation for why directly stylized baselines fail and why a reconstruction-guided recovery path is necessary. Extensive experiments on DIV2K and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of StyleStegaNet. And few-shot image steganalysis with two deep detectors further shows detection accuracy near random guessing, approximately 51\%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22392