Embedding
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RPA: Residual Patch-Token Adapter for Image Retrieval from EEG and MEG
2026-10-06 01:25:45Yuhui Jin, Yonghao Song, Bingchuan LiuAbstract
Most existing MEG and EEG (M/EEG) visual decoding methods align brain signals with a single global embedding extracted from a pretrained visual encoder, leaving open whether intermediate patch representations, which preserve richer and more granular rich visual information, can improve representation learning. To address this question, we introduce the Residual Patch Adapter (RPA), a lightweight, modular adapter that leverages all patch tokens from an intermediate layer of a ViT visual encoder for alignment. Through extensive ablation analyses, we first show that pooling or masking patch tokens degrades the learned representation, demonstrating that retaining the full set of patch tokens is important for EEG alignment, while the CLS token provides little unique information. We then use a series of six quantitative feature analyses to show that both higher-level semantics and lower-level visual features, including color and texture, are essential for this EEG-to-image alignment. Under current protocols, our system achieves Top-1 accuracies of 95.4\% within-subject and 35.5\% cross-subject on THINGS-EEG2, and 65.2\% and 6.7\%, respectively, on THINGS-MEG, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across both datasets. Evaluations with alternative brain encoders, including pretrained EEG foundation models, demonstrate that the approach extends beyond the projection-based EEG encoder. Furthermore, we provide a plug-and-play interface that allows RPA to be replaced by convolution, attention, or ConvNeXt alternatives. Together, these findings provide significant insight into M/EEG-to-image representation learning by establishing design principles for leveraging the latent space of visual encoders, and open new directions for brain--image alignment and non-invasive brain--computer interface (BCI).
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31698
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Two Vectors Replace In-Context Demos: Structured Task Adaptation via Embeddings
2026-10-06 01:05:57Xi Ding, Naichen Shi, Jiawei ZhangAbstract
In-context learning (ICL) adapts frozen large multimodal models (LMMs) to new tasks from a few demonstrations (demos), but re-encodes them at every query, where each demo image adds up to hundreds of visual tokens. Demo-free methods remove this cost with a compact task state. However, they add it at locations searched per task or at every decoder layer, where task parameters grow with depth. Moreover, inserted tokens or keys cannot change how the original prompt divides its attention within a layer. To address these issues, we propose Structured Task Adaptation via Embeddings (STAVE), which replaces demos with two task-specific vectors added to existing input embeddings. Specifically, a readout vector updates the answer-producing tokens and a context vector updates the other structural token groups. Both are trained with answer labels on prompts with and without demos. We justify these design choices theoretically using a first-order analysis of the loss and a margin bound. Extensive experiments on six LMMs and five large language models show that STAVE matches or outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multimodal tasks with far fewer task parameters and surpasses 15-shot ICL and prior task vectors on 18 text tasks, all at zero-shot inference cost.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07572
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Preserving Unstable Modes Through Inverse Dynamics in JEPA World Models
2026-10-06 00:08:43Leonardo F. Toso, Yann LeCun, James Anderson, Oumayma BounouAbstract
Robotic systems often exhibit unstable modes, along which small perturbations and disturbances can cause unbounded growth unless corrected through feedback. Controlling such systems from high-dimensional visual observations requires representations that preserve these modes. Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) provide a natural framework for learning such representations and their dynamics from visual data. However, we demonstrate that next step prediction combined with anti-collapse regularization does not guarantee that controllable unstable modes are preserved: the training loss can be minimized while these modes are collapsed, making stabilization from the learned representation impossible. To address this, we augment world-model training with an action reconstruction objective (i.e., an inverse dynamics loss) that encourages control-aware representations, namely, visual representations that preserve crucial features for control. We prove that exact action reconstruction makes the encoder injective on the finite-horizon reachable subspace. Thus, the encoder cannot discard any state direction reachable by an action sequence within $H$ steps. Moreover, we show that, as $H$ grows, the dominant eigenspace of the finite-horizon controllability Gramian converges to the controllable unstable subspace. We establish our theoretical results for linear systems and demonstrate empirically that our findings extend to nonlinear visual control tasks (CartPole, Walker2D, and PointMaze), highlighting the benefits of control-aware representation learning.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07540
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Decoupling What from Where: How Should a Small GUI Grounding Model Receive the Action Type?
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A GUI agent decides which action to take and where to take it; we ask how a small grounding model should receive the action type. Fine-tuning Qwen2-VL-2B with LoRA on Android in the Wild, we compare a flat baseline with five ways of supplying the type under matched data, compute, and decoding: an auxiliary loss, a hard-routed action word, an additive learned embedding, a prepended learned token, and the type written into the prompt. With five seeds, an episode-clustered bootstrap, and seed-level paired tests, the ranking on a mixed stream is clear: the auxiliary loss, the additive embedding, and the prompt word each gain five to seven hit@0.10 points over the baseline, while hard routing and the prepended token are not distinguishable from it. Much of that gain is protection from a preprocessing choice of ours rather than a spatial prior. Our serializer clamps the off-screen touch point AITW records for type events to the origin; that class degrades the baseline's click grounding, and removing it lifts the baseline by nearly seven points, after which no mechanism's hit rate beats it and the intervals exclude a two-point effect, though the auxiliary loss still shortens the average miss; on a stream of taps and swipes none helps. Whether this generalizes beyond one serialization is open. For deployment, the pipeline's margin over the baseline with predicted rather than gold types is not established (+0.016, 95% interval [-0.017, +0.052]), and a wrong type collapses every model conditioned at inference. The prepended token does not help at the shared learning rate, where its rows barely move from initialization; trained ten times faster it reaches the level of the other three, with a margin three seeds do not establish. We also document a silent failure: injecting conditioning through inputs_embeds makes Qwen2-VL fall back to 1-D positions for image tokens, costing nine points.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07444
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WildMatch: Weakly Supervised Image Matcher Adaptation for Wildlife Re-Identification
2026-10-05 20:54:45Turhan Can Kargin, Piotr Kubaty, Ekaterina Rostovskaya, Izabela Wierzbowska, Bartosz Zieli\'nski, Marcin Przewi\k{e}\'zlikowskiAbstract
Individual animal re-identification from camera-trap imagery is an instance retrieval problem central to non-invasive wildlife monitoring: a query image must retrieve the correct individual from a reference set of known animals. This requires computer vision models to recognize distinctive local patterns in fur, skin, or other visual markings. Current approaches either learn global embeddings as a classification problem, requiring many labeled images per individual while largely ignoring local evidence, or apply off-the-shelf, domain-agnostic image matchers. Although such matchers are pretrained on large and diverse image collections, adapting them to wildlife imagery is challenging because available datasets are small and lack correspondence-level annotations. We study weakly supervised adaptation of a pretrained keypoint matcher using only identity labels, without keypoint-level or geometric correspondence ground truth. We mine informative image pairs with the pretrained matcher, derive weak positive and negative supervision from identity agreement, and contrastively fine-tune the matching network to strengthen correspondences for same-identity pairs and suppress them for different identities. Across open-source wildlife re-identification datasets, our approach improves accuracy over off-the-shelf matchers and a state-of-the-art local--global fusion method. Under an open-world protocol with held-out individuals, it learns a transferable correspondence prior rather than memorizing training identities. To our knowledge, this is the first study of matcher-level, identity-supervised adaptation for animal re-identification. Our method enables data-efficient specialization of image matching models to wildlife domains using identity annotations already available in typical monitoring datasets.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07384
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CausalBind: Causal Modeling and Learning for Protein-Molecule Virtual Screening
2026-10-05 20:14:51Loka Li, Jin Tian, Kun ZhangAbstract
Protein-molecule virtual screening is increasingly cast as a problem of representation learning in a shared embedding space. Existing methods rely on dense holistic alignment, entangling invariant binding determinants with nuisance correlations and limiting transfer to new targets. It has been noted that binding in protein-molecule systems involves sparse cross-modality interactions: binding is governed by a small contact interface and a few decisive local interactions (e.g., hydrogen bonds, hydrophobic contacts, and salt bridges) rather than the global structures of the protein and molecule. We hypothesize that uncovering and leveraging sparse interaction patterns is critical for generalization beyond the training data, as these patterns are reusable and expected to improve performance across different scenarios. In this paper, we aim to identify and leverage sparse interaction patterns, and verify our hypothesis. Since the training data contain only observed binding pairs, we formalize this prior via a V-structure causal model under Heckman-style selection, and establish three theoretical results: (i) the latent concepts of interacting proteins and molecules are not identifiable without appropriate sparsity constraints; (ii) these concepts and their sparse interactions are component-wise identifiable under structural sparsity conditions; and (iii) a low-rank relaxation of these conditions yields subspace identifiability of the concepts and interactions. Inspired by these principles, we propose CausalBind with three implementation variants. Extensive experiments on DUD-E and LIT-PCBA benchmarks show that all variants consistently outperform strong retrieval baselines, with the largest gains on LIT-PCBA early enrichment, and further generalize to target- and scaffold-level out-of-distribution splits. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07340
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Understanding and Mitigating Inference-Time Overreliance Using Agentic Memory
2026-10-05 19:48:54Luoxi Tang, Yuqiao Meng, Nilesh Auradkar, Muchao Ye, Dazheng Zhang, Zhaohan XiAbstract
Agentic memory allows LLM agents to reuse past experience, yet retrieved memories can also distort inference even when they are benign, correctly stored, and appropriately retrieved. We study this failure mode, which we call memory over-reliance. Across benchmarks and memory architectures, we find that memory is useful when past experience transfers to the current task, but can become misleading when only part of the evidence transfers. Failures are strongest under partial query-memory overlap, a pattern further confirmed by controlled experiments thatvary the amount of overlapping evidence. Motivated by this finding, we propose MEMTRIM, a plug-and-play framework that indexes memory evidence at write time and controls its reuse at read time. MEMTRIM removes repeated or conflicting evidence while preserving useful memory-specific information, requires no retraining, and applies to both embedding-based and structured memory this http URL show that MEMTRIM reduces memory overreliance while preserving the benefits of useful memory across models and memory settings.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07311
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What Words Keep of a Place: Zero-Shot Language Reasoning for Cross-View Geo-Localization
2026-10-05 19:11:38Ayesh Abu Lehyeh, Jay Hwasung Jung, Safwan WshahAbstract
Cross-view geo-localization is commonly solved as an image retrieval problem, matching a ground-level image against a database of satellite tiles through a jointly trained embedding. Such models are accurate, but they need large paired supervision and cannot show what evidence supports a match. In this paper, we study a different question: how much of this task can be solved through language alone? We prompt a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to describe each ground panorama and each satellite tile as structured text, and localize by comparing these descriptions. No component is trained. We evaluate on 9,826 VIGOR pairs from four U.S. cities, in three settings. First, the descriptions are faithful but not discriminative. They agree closely across the two views, yet ranking the full pool by description similarity almost never returns the correct tile (0.39% Recall@1). Second, we narrow the pool to ten neighboring tiles, as a coarse prior would do. The same descriptions now become useful: an MLLM judge that scores structural consistency doubles random ranking and matches a strong lexical baseline. It also states which fields of the two descriptions agree and which conflict, which an embedding distance cannot do, and which we see as a step toward interpretable localization. Third, we place the judge on a trained visual retriever. On the queries it ranks wrongly, reranking from images works, while reranking from our descriptions does not (23.5% against 10.7% Recall@1). Scene structure survives the conversion into language, while the fine appearance detail needed to separate nearby places does not. Code and prompts are publicly available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07269
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Sim-to-Real Transfer of Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments Using an Ackermann-Steered Mobile Robot
2026-10-05 18:09:22Chalindu Abeywansa, Sahan Gunasekara, Devindi De Silva, Seniru Dissanayake, Ranga Rodrigo, Peshala JayasekaraAbstract
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables robots to navigate through environments using natural language instructions, making human-robot interaction intuitive. Traditional VLN models often rely on navigation graphs, 360-degree views, and perfect localization which pose significant challenges when adapting these models to real-world settings. This work addresses these limitations by performing a simulation-to-real domain shift of a VLN approach that operates in continuous environments without requiring navigation graphs or panoramic views. The proposed system integrates vision-language models that align visual inputs and linguistic instructions within a shared embedding space, facilitating natural language-driven navigation. We employ a Cross-Modal Attention (CMA) based architecture trained on an existing dataset in a simulated environment and fine-tune it using real-world data collected from a custom-built Ackermann-steered robot equipped with a camera and a LiDAR sensor. By utilising linear photometric adjustments and fine-tuning on a limited number of episodes, our model successfully adapts to real-world environments, achieving effective navigation while running offline on dedicated hardware. Experimental results, evaluated using Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) and Normalized Dynamic Time Warping (nDTW) metrics, demonstrate the robustness and adaptability of our approach. Keywords: Vision-Language Navigation, Cross-Modal Attention, Natural Language Instructions, Sim-to-Real Transfer, Autonomous Navigation, Ackermann-steering.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07192
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Aggregating User Preferences while Ensuring Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion using Graph Summarization
2026-10-05 17:53:07Adji Marieme Sita Ciss\'e, Malek MouhoubAbstract
Aggregating the preferences of diverse user groups into a collective outcome raises fundamental challenges of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI): classical aggregation rules such as Borda and Condorcet have no mechanism to prevent results from systematically favoring majority groups, collapsing onto homogeneous items, or under-representing minorities. We address this problem through EDI-constrained graph summarization. User preferences are modeled as a weighted attributed bipartite graph, and a greedy coarsening algorithm iteratively merges user nodes while enforcing three structural EDI criteria: an equity gap constraint ($\Delta E$), an intra-list diversity constraint (ILD), and a group inclusion constraint. Rather than correcting fairness after aggregation, our method embeds EDI preservation directly into the graph structure. We evaluate across five datasets spanning four domains: MovieLens 100k and 1M, this http URL, Rate My Professors, and OpenAlex (2018-2023). Our method, AURORA, achieves the largest and most consistent diversity gains over classical voting rules, and on MovieLens 100k at $k = 20$ it simultaneously improves all three EDI criteria over both Borda and Condorcet. On Rate My Professors, it combines high diversity (ILD = 0.808) with the highest female item representation (60%), at a moderate equity cost, and it achieves the lowest equity gap ($\Delta E = 0.031$) on OpenAlex, where Borda-based methods recommend zero female authors. On this http URL, the only dataset where the sensitive attribute is present on both sides of the bipartite graph, our method does not reduce the equity gap, a limitation we connect to prior findings that demographic parity is not always an appropriate target. These results demonstrate that embedding EDI constraints into aggregation structure yields more robust fairness-diversity trade-offs than post-hoc approaches.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07128
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Jailbreaking Open-Weight LLMs via Random Embedding Perturbations
2026-10-05 17:50:10Abhinav Sudhakar Dubey (University of California Santa Cruz), Scott Sirri (University of California Santa Cruz), Vaggos Chatziafratis (University of California Santa Cruz), C. Seshadhri (University of California Santa Cruz)Abstract
While open-weight models have enjoyed steady progress in capabilities and wide adoption across multiple domains, their safety remains an important concern. One key feature is the ability to refuse or deflect harmful, malicious, or insensitive prompts. In this paper, we expose safety vulnerabilities across six common open-weight LLMs of various sizes that consistently lead to harmful or unsafe responses on the JailbreakBench benchmark dataset. Our proposed attack, Perturbed Embedding Vector (PEV), is a simple and fast "jailbreaking" technique that is cheaper than prior approaches, which typically require gradient computations, per-prompt optimizations, or altering internal weights of the models. PEV just adds independent Gaussian noise in the embedding vector representations of the prompt, with no need for further manipulations. To generate unsafe responses, we repeatedly sample additive noise from this distribution. In our experiments, we observe that the average compute cost to get the first successful attack is up to an order of magnitude less than previous attacks. The first successful jailbreak on a new prompt typically arrives within one minute on every tested model, and PEV generates unsafe responses across all models for all prompts in JailbreakBench. No other tested method achieves such results, despite them taking longer to run. More broadly, we believe that understanding the behavior of LLMs under perturbations in the embedding vectors is an important research direction: while perturbations constitute a major security risk, they can also serve as a valuable tool for exploring the dynamical behavior of such models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07125
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Sample-Optimal Estimation of the Fr'echet Inception Distance
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The Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) is widely used to evaluate generative models, but its empirical plug-in estimator suffers from finite-sample bias [BSAG18, CF20]. We study the sample complexity $n$ of estimating FID to error $\epsilon$ between $d$-dimensional Gaussians with bounded mean distance and covariances, when one distribution is known. Our contributions are threefold. (1) We establish tight finite-sample $\Theta(\frac{d^2}{n})$ bias and $\Theta(\frac{d}{n} + \frac {d^2} {n^2})$ variance bounds for the empirical plug-in estimator, establishing a $\gtrsim d^2$ sample complexity. (2) To debias the empirical plug-in estimator, we generalize the ${\rm FID}_\infty$ estimator of [CF20] to extrapolation methods of arbitrary order $k$. We further prove tight bias and variance bounds of $\Theta(\frac{d^{k + 2}}{n^{k + 1}})$ and $\Theta(\frac d n + \frac{d^2}{n^2})$ for any order-$k$ extrapolation under our framework. (3) We introduce Relative Taylor Debiasing (RTD), a new, computationally efficient FID estimation algorithm using debiasing techniques inspired by U-statistics. We show that RTD achieves an $O(\frac d {\epsilon^2})$ sample complexity, and prove that this is optimal. We provide a complementary empirical evaluation of our new estimators. Our experiments on synthetic Gaussians validate the predicted residual bias and support the tightness of our bounds. On ImageNet with Inception embeddings, RTD achieves the lowest mean estimation error at the standard 50K sample budget, while our second-order variance-aware extrapolation estimator (VALE$_2$) uses only 10K samples to achieve accuracy comparable to FID$_\infty$ at 50K samples.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07114
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Neural Representations, Natural Connections: What Transfers From Human Speech Foundation Models to Animal Vocalizations?
2026-10-05 15:09:02Tom\'as Arias-Vergara, Christopher Hauer, H\'elo\"ise Brotier, Elmar N\"oth, Andreas Maier, Lee KorenAbstract
Speech-pretrained models have shown promise in animal bioacoustics, but the factors governing their cross-species transfer remain poorly understood. We evaluate 15 frozen encoders spanning monolingual and multilingual speech, speaker verification, animal bioacoustics, and general audio on caller identification across four species and call-type classification across three. Differences between the strongest speech- and animal-pretrained representations range from $-0.027$ to $+0.119$ UAR; speech is significantly better in three of seven settings ($p<0.01$) and not significantly different in the remaining four. Controlled comparisons show no systematic advantage from increased language coverage or animal-domain pretraining, while frozen speaker-verification embeddings transfer poorly. The results also show that transfer is strongly layer-dependent: raw-waveform models peak early, whereas patch-spectrogram models peak deeper.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07107
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From Pixels, Without Pre-training: Joint Generative and Self-Supervised Representation Learning in One Model
2026-10-05 02:51:03Vicente Balmaseda, Ching-Long Lin, Tianbao YangAbstract
Strong image generation models are conditioned on class labels, aligned to frozen pretrained encoders, or built on separately trained autoencoders. While effective, generation then depends on supervision or pretraining: labels must be annotated, and encoders or autoencoders pretrained for the target domain. We study joint generative and self-supervised representation learning in a single model, enabling self-conditioned generation without labels or pretrained models. This is challenging because the objectives are mismatched: contrastive learning consumes clean augmented views and favors coarse, invariant semantics, while flow matching consumes noisy images and must preserve the fine detail and spatial layout that contrastive learning discards. We propose SCION (Self-conditioned Generation on Self-supervised representation), whose core is a single pixel-space encoder conditioned on the flow timestep and an embedding. For representation learning, this conditioning embedding is a learned global vector shared across images, with the encoder's [CLS] token yielding the semantic representation trained by the contrastive loss. For generative training, the conditioning embedding is the image's own [CLS] representation, while patch tokens pass through a decoder to predict the image. To sample without a reference image at inference, we jointly learn a prior over the embedding. Gradient-norm balancing and stop-gradient mechanisms enable joint optimization in one run. SCION is self-supervised and self-contained, with no labels or pretrained models. On ImageNet 256x256, with the JiT-B recipe and no representation guidance, SCION reaches 8.92 FID, surpassing class-unconditional iREPA, which aligns to pretrained DINOv2 (46.44), and RCG, which conditions on it (14.27). With JiT-L, SCION achieves 5.89 FID without guidance and 3.47 with representation guidance, outperforming RCG with the ADM recipe (6.24).
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05711
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WiSPER: Pose-Supervised Predictive and Residual Flow Refinement For Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation With WiFi CSI
2026-10-04 16:57:06Gabriel Lee Jun Rong, Shanhong Liu, Pai Chet Ng, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis, Jamal Seyedmohammadi, S. Mohammad SheikholeslamiAbstract
Multi-person 3D pose estimation with WiFi channel state information (CSI) is challenging because reflections from different people overlap without directly identifying individual joints. Existing masked embedding objectives capture wireless relationships without explicit pose supervision, while structured decoders can retain coordinate errors. We propose WiSPER, a two-stage framework combining pose-aware predictive pretraining with conditional residual flow refinement. Pose-Aware Masked Embedding Learning (PAMEL) couples masked latent prediction with auxiliary pose-set supervision on the same CSI context, guiding the encoder toward joint localization from partial observations. Residual Flow refinement with Transformer (ReFT) generates a set of pose candidates to accommodate a variable number of people and refines each candidate through a conditional flow guided by its coarse coordinates and per-joint decoder features. Both stages use paired CSI and pose annotations during training, while inference requires only CSI. Experiments on the PiW3D dataset show that WiSPER achieves an overall mean per-joint position error of 63.72 mm, a 40.0% reduction relative to WiFi-JEPA. For experiments with two and three people, WiSPER reduces MPJPE by 42.1% and 38.1%, respectively. Pose-supervised pretraining configurations obtain lower errors than CSI-only JEPA, and enabling the trained residual refiner reduces overall MPJPE by 13.8-15.6% across the evaluated configurations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07025
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Learning to Curate What You Generate for Generalizable Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning
2026-10-04 13:15:36Junhui Yin, Yuchen Yang, Yilin Yin, Shuai Na, Haoran Xi, Jianhua Yang, Muyi Sun, Man Zhang, Shengfeng HeAbstract
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to learn novel classes from limited annotations while preserving prior knowledge. Existing methods typically assume a sufficiently large base session, but this assumption fails when both base and incremental data are scarce, leading to weak initial representations, semantic drift, and unstable boundaries. We study this underexplored yet realistic setting, termed Generalizable FSCIL (G-FSCIL), where the base session itself contains only a few classes. Although synthetic data can alleviate supervision scarcity, naively mixing generated samples often introduces semantic noise and exacerbates old-new boundary conflicts. To address this, we propose a framework that curates trustworthy synthetic knowledge for stable G-FSCIL. Specifically, we first construct class-specific synthetic candidate pools using a frozen latent diffusion model, where class inversion is performed at the first observation and the resulting condition embeddings are reused for on-demand generation. Building on these candidates, we learn a knowledge curation strategy that selects samples with both semantic consistency and visual diversity, and distill this process into a transferable selection policy during the base session, which is then reused without further optimization. Leveraging the curated synthetic data, we further design a boundary-stable incremental adaptation scheme, including synthetic-informed prototype initialization and bidirectional boundary calibration to mitigate old-new conflicts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing FSCIL baselines, with reduced forgetting and improved balance between old and new classes. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07008
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Should We Skip Diffusion?
2026-10-04 09:42:27Yiping Ji, James Martens, Simon LuceyAbstract
Diffusion models learn semantic representations while generating images. In the Decoupled Diffusion Transformer (DDT), a condition encoder provides features that guide a velocity decoder in denoising. To enable effective denoising at all noise levels, these features must capture both high-level abstract structures and low-level details. However, skip/residual connections in the encoder allow shallow features to bypass successive transformations, which may limit progressive abstraction, or at least make it difficult to disentangle different levels of abstraction. We propose DDT-RFE, which removes the residual connections around the Self-Attention and MLP operations in each encoder block while maintaining stable training. To retain the information that abstraction discards but that the decoder still needs, we fuse the input patch embedding with intermediate and final encoder features to form the encoder output. The decoder thus has access to information from multiple encoder depths, while each encoder block is able to learn more abstract representations. DDT-RFE achieves overall improvements over DDT across visual understanding tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, object discovery, and semantic correspondence, while using fewer encoder blocks. It also achieves a lower FID for image generation on ImageNet.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07002
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Visual-Invariance-Augmented Feature Optimal Alignment for Transferable Adversarial Attacks against Closed-Source MLLMs
2026-10-04 00:16:22Xiaojun Jia, Simeng Qin, Yiming Li, Jie Liao, Sensen Gao, Ke Ma, Yang Liu, Xiaochun CaoAbstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain vulnerable to transferable adversarial examples, especially in black-box settings where only open-source surrogate models are accessible. Existing targeted transfer attacks mainly align adversarial and target samples using global image-level features, such as encoder [CLS] embeddings. However, such coarse alignment insufficiently exploits patch-level visual structures, limiting transferability across heterogeneous closed-source MLLMs. We propose IAU-FOA, a visual-invariance-augmented feature optimal alignment attack with adaptive unbalanced transport, to improve targeted transferability against closed-source MLLMs. IAU-FOA aligns adversarial and target samples at both global and local levels: a cosine-based objective narrows their global semantic gap, while patch tokens are clustered into compact local patterns and matched through optimal transport for fine-grained feature alignment. Balanced optimal transport enforces fixed marginal masses even for local clusters without reliable counterparts, potentially introducing misleading alignment gradients. We therefore introduce confidence-adaptive unbalanced transport to relax these constraints for weakly matched clusters, aiming to reduce unreliable local alignment and improve adversarial transferability. We further study the effect of input transformations and propose visual-invariance augmentation, which applies bidirectional pixel-intensity rescaling and per-channel white-balance adjustment to simulate exposure, contrast, illumination, and color-temperature variations. This strategy encourages adversarial perturbations to generalize across different visual encoders. Extensive experiments on open-source and closed-source MLLMs show that IAU-FOA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art transferable attack methods. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06977
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ACG-WAM: World-Action Modeling via Action-Conditioned Geometric Latent Prediction
2026-10-03 17:52:59Jiangtao Liu, Zishang Xiang, Yage He, Lingguo Cui, Baihai Zhang, Runqi Chai, Senchun ChaiAbstract
World action models jointly learn visual predictionand robot actions, providing a way to use observations ofscene evolution for policy learning. Their video and actionlosses, however, provide no explicit target for the geometricconsequences of a demonstrated action sequence. Moreover,visual features taken after temporal attention can contain futureobservations, making them unsuitable as the sole current visualinput to an auxiliary predictor. We introduce ACG-WAMand its auxiliary objective, the Action-Conditioned GeometricJoint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (ACG-JEPA), whichpredicts geometric features at several horizons from the currentobservation and intervening actions, using the future slot of afrozen VGGT encoding of each current and future image pairas the target. We apply this supervision from the head and wristcameras to a shared visual embedding before temporal mixing,and remove the teacher and auxiliary modules at this http URL 50 RoboTwin 2.0 tasks, ACG-WAM achieves 93.46%success in clean scenes, with the best randomized success(92.68%) and mean across both settings (93.07%) among thecompared methods; across three tasks on a real robot, itachieves 85.00% success and 91.67% partial completion score,exceeding Motus by 10.00 and 9.17 percentage points, respec-tively. Code:this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06965
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WavePrune: One period is often enough for RoPE
2026-10-03 17:01:53Guancheng Du, Luotian Huang, Shaowen Wang, Si Li, Kaifeng LyuAbstract
Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) encodes token positions by rotating each two-dimensional channel of the query and key vectors at a channel-specific frequency, making the attention logits invariant to a common shift of positions. However, this rotation is periodic, and it leads to position aliasing where relative positions separated by a full rotation period become hard to tell apart. To address this, we propose WavePrune, which restricts each channel to its first rotation period. We show that it removes the distractions in attention maps created by position aliasing and improves overall long-context performance. Specifically, WavePrune raises the HELMET score on four of five models we test without any extra tuning (e.g., 35.7 -> 40.0 on Qwen3-8B). When pretraining models from scratch, WavePrune also achieves lower validation loss at extrapolated lengths than pretraining without it. Because WavePrune restricts each channel to a sliding window, it induces a fine-grained sparsity that our hardware-aligned CUDA kernels exploit for 1.15x prefill and 1.24x decoding speedups over FlashAttention-2 at 32K context. Together, these results show that RoPE's periodic structure, widely regarded as essential, is largely redundant beyond the first rotation period.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06963
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