Few-Shot
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Multi-Target Few-Shot Prompting with Diffusion Language Models
2026-10-15 17:44:46Anton Xue, Alan Li, Rahul SahaAbstract
Few-shot prompting is useful when instructions and rewards are hard to specify. One such application is editing by example, where a demonstrated formatting change or API migration may need to be applied across multiple sites. However, such edits often depend on both left and right context, making generation with causal autoregressive models awkward. We therefore introduce multi-target few-shot prompting with diffusion language models, where examples guide the infilling of multiple masked regions within a shared canvas. To address the known challenge of reliably following demonstrations in few-shot prompting, we further leverage selective masking of the canvas to derive a likelihood-ratio reward that favors example-supported infills. Across few-shot prompting benchmarks and software refactoring case studies, we find that demonstrations improve infilling accuracy, with example guidance yielding further gains in several settings.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22294
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Beyond Pairwise Repulsion: Collective Diversity via Determinant Maximization in Diffusion Sampling
2026-10-15 17:32:25Kwanyoung Lee, SeungJu Cha, Yebin Ahn, Sungho Koh, Dong-Jin KimAbstract
Strong guidance in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models concentrates sampling toward high-density modes of the conditional distribution, collapsing independently sampled noise vectors onto nearly identical visual prototypes. This limits utility for tasks that demand distributional breadth, most critically synthetic data augmentation. Diversity, however, is a collective property of the whole batch: a set can preserve every pairwise distance yet still collapse onto a low-dimensional subspace. Existing sum-of-pairwise noise-optimization and repulsion objectives respond only weakly to this higher-order failure. We propose DetNO (Determinant Noise Optimization), which formulates diverse generation as RKHS volume maximization on the initial noise, maximizing the log-determinant of an RBF Gram matrix over one-step Tweedie predictions. This set-level functional equals the squared batch volume; its repulsion is strongest when the batch is most collapsed and self-attenuates as diversity is achieved. An anchor-based fidelity term keeps the optimized noises near plausible regions, and Lagrangian relaxation gives a two-term objective with a single hyperparameter $\lambda$ governing the diversity-quality trade-off, without training or sampler modification. Across three backbones (SD1.5, SDXL, SD3), DetNO achieves leading intra-batch diversity in VendiScore and Mean Self-Similarity, and a downstream few-shot classification experiment confirms that broader mode coverage brings statistically significant accuracy gains for synthetic data augmentation in the low-shot regime. Fixing the pipeline and varying only the batch objective, both RBF-based aggregators outperform InfoNCE, and the log-determinant attains the best downstream accuracy on both benchmarks. Its diversity advantage over InfoNCE widens as the batch grows. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22267
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LAMP: Layerwise Adaptive Mixing of Predictors for Training-Free Few-Shot Vision-Language Adaptation
2026-10-15 16:35:40Zhipeng Ye, Feng Jiang, Qiufeng Wang, Hao LiAbstract
Few-shot adaptation often relies on an encoder's final global representation, leaving complementary information in intermediate layers underused. Combining these features is challenging because their dimensions can differ and their usefulness varies across tasks. We propose LAMP, Layerwise Adaptive Mixing of Predictors, a training-free framework that combines global and regional information from multiple encoder layers. A single forward pass per view supplies all descriptors. Global and support-calibrated regional kernel predictors independently fit the same label residuals. Labeled validation data select their mixture in class-score space, preserving native feature dimensions without learned projections. LAMP-F further adapts text-anchored class prototypes, using a cached response to update the fixed-kernel residual predictions exactly. Experiments cover eleven datasets and ViT and ResNet backbones. LAMP achieves state-of-the-art mean accuracy among the compared published training-free ResNet-50 methods at 4, 8, and 16 shots, reaching 78.73% at 16 shots. Averaged across five support budgets, LAMP improves over a paired global-feature-only baseline by 1.14 and 1.59 percentage points on ViT-B/16 and ResNet-50; LAMP-F raises these gains to 1.96 and 2.54 points. LAMP-F reaches 16-shot accuracies of 83.57% and 79.10%, respectively. Controlled experiments identify multi-layer integration as the main source of improvement and examine pooling, calibration, validation labels, and computational cost. These findings show that combining layer-specific predictions can exploit complementary features from frozen encoders to improve few-shot classification.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22182
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Abstracts or full text? Evaluating input scope and computational efficiency in biomedical lay summarization
2026-10-15 11:13:36Egecan \c{C}elik Evgin, \.{I}lknur Karadeniz, Olcay Taner Y{\i}ld{\i}zAbstract
Biomedical research articles are mainly written for experts and often contain terms that are difficult for the general public to understand. Automated lay summarization has become a solution to make biomedical knowledge easier for patients and the public to understand. However, generating lay summaries from full-text articles requires more computing power because the articles are long and costly to process. Fine-tuning large language models for this task also requires substantial resources. This study asks two questions: (1) whether abstracts contain enough information to produce lay summaries as good as those based on full-text articles, and (2) whether few-shot learning performs as well as task-specific fine-tuning. The study used two public biomedical lay summarization datasets and two recent models, evaluated for readability, factual consistency, semantic similarity, and runtime efficiency. Results show that abstract-based summarization performs better overall. Across both datasets and models, abstract fine-tuning is 4.70 times faster, while abstract zero- and few-shot prompting is 5.31 times faster than full-text methods. These results show that abstract-based prompting reduces runtime cost while maintaining lay summary quality.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21690
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Where, How, and When: Query-Guided Grounding for Video Understanding
2026-10-15 07:32:57Yogesh KumarAbstract
Understanding video content requires reasoning at multiple levels of granularity, from identifying objects to interpreting their interactions and localizing when specific actions occur. This thesis studies three query-guided grounding tasks that answer where key objects are (object-level grounding), how they interact (relationship-level grounding), and when specific moments occur (moment-level grounding). For object-level grounding, we present QDETRv, a query-guided extension of the Detection Transformer for one-shot localization of unseen objects in videos, which combines query-context fusion, a memory module for temporal consistency, and unsupervised pretraining on synthetic object trajectories. We further propose the Temporal Object-Aware Vision Transformer (TOViT) for few-shot video object detection, which builds on a language-aligned open-set vision encoder and propagates high-confidence object features across frames. For relationship-level grounding, we introduce few-shot referring relationships in videos: given a (subject, predicate, object) query and a few support videos sharing the predicate, the entities are localized by optimizing a T-partite random field using a meta-learned relation network with query-conditioned translational embeddings, Global Semantic Aggregation, Local Localization Aggregation, and belief-propagation-based message passing. For moment-level grounding, we propose the Moment Alignment Transformer (MATR) for video-to-video moment retrieval, which uses dual-stage Dynamic Time Warping for pre- and post-fusion alignment, learnable queries for boundary prediction, and self-supervised pretraining with temporal augmentations; MATR also extends to text-to-video moment retrieval with performance comparable to, or better than, the state of the art. These contributions advance query-guided video understanding across spatial, relational, and temporal grounding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21422
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From Observation to Intervention: Distilling Self-Generated In-Context Demonstrations via Executable Causal Intervention
2026-10-15 03:06:20Minming Ye, Min Liu, Haoang Chi, Ciheng Wu, Naiyang GuanAbstract
Self-generated In-Context Learning (ICL) enables LLMs to synthesize their own few-shot demonstrations, often outperforming manual prompts. However, existing methods filter demonstrations by observation, assuming a rationale is high-quality if it leads to the correct output. We show such filtering suffers from \textit{observational equivalence}, whereby both faithful causal rationales and spurious post-hoc rationales can yield same outputs and are statistically indistinguishable from observation alone. Inspired by independent causal mechanisms, we argue that faithful rationales imply \textit{transfer invariance}, in which causal rationales should remain effective across logically similar samples. We instantiate this criterion as \textbf{E}xecutable \textbf{C}ausal \textbf{I}ntervention for \textbf{D}emonstrations \textbf{D}istillation (ECI2D), which abstracts language rationales into executable programs and applies the causal interventions ($do$-operator) on logically similar samples, retaining only those demonstrations that imply transfer invariance. Experiments on math, logical and commonsense reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ECI2D consistently outperforms observation-based ICL while retaining far fewer demonstrations, with gains exceeding 7 points as the test distribution shifts.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21149
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Few-Shot Adaptation for Anomalous Sound Detection at Low False-Positive Rate
2026-10-14 09:51:03Simone Lugani, Christof Pichler, Hannes Wegleiter, Christoph Feilmayr, Rodolfo Zunino, Edoardo RagusaAbstract
Reliable fault detection is crucial for industrial machinery in large-scale facilities, where unexpected failures can cause costly downtime and production interruptions. Although acoustic monitoring provides a scalable solution for machine condition monitoring, its deployment is often constrained by high false-positive rates. We propose a two-step approach to automatic anomalous sound detection: first, when only normal operating audio samples are available, a regularized unsupervised model is deployed; then, after the first machine fault, a few-shot adaptation strategy exploits the anomalous samples acquired during the fault to improve the system. This adaptation increases the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPR) from 23.0 to 64.0 and improves detection in the low false-positive-rate region, with the partial area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (pAUROC) increasing from 39.6 to 72.8. We also show that covariance regularization improves both prediction accuracy and training stability in the unsupervised model. These results provide a practical strategy for acoustic anomaly detection systems, enabling improved accuracy and reduced false alarms.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19893
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What Matters for World Modeling in Vision-Language-Action Models?
2026-10-14 09:01:30Qisen Ma, Yixiang Chen, Yuan Xu, Peiyan Li, Jiabing Yang, Kai Wang, Jianhua Yang, Jianlou Si, Jun Huang, Jing Liu, Nianfeng Liu, Yan Huang, Liang WangAbstract
Integrating world models into Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) has emerged as a promising direction, enabling policies to anticipate future dynamics beyond reactive observation-to-action mapping. However, existing approaches vary simultaneously in their world representations, integration paradigms, and policy backbones, making it difficult to determine what truly matters for effective world model integration. To disentangle these factors, we categorize existing efforts into four representative paradigms, namely Implicit Future Alignment, Explicit Future Query, MoT Future Expert, and External World Predictor. We instantiate each within a unified framework and systematically evaluate these paradigms with diverse world representations and policy backbones across in-domain, out-of-domain, long-horizon, dynamic, few-shot, and real-world settings. Our study yields four main findings: 1) world representation effectiveness is paradigm-dependent, whereas 2D semantic representations offer robust, cross-paradigm gains; 2) no single paradigm is universally optimal, yet the decoupled MoT Future Expert offers competitive overall performance, particularly in OOD robustness; 3) world modeling consistently benefits policies built on standard VLMs, while decoupled designs exhibit greater compatibility with pretrained VLAs; and 4) world modeling improves performance over action-only baselines across multiple settings, with notable gains on long-horizon and dynamic tasks. Project page and video demonstrations are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19825
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Back-Translation Still Matters: Leveraging Monolingual Data for Low-Resource Machine Translation with LLMs
2026-10-14 07:55:24Divyanshu Bathla, Parag Singla, Jitin SinglaAbstract
Pre-trained Large Language Model (LLMs) are effective on many tasks in zero-shot and few-shot settings. For machine translation of low-resource languages, the obvious options are few-shot prompting and fine-tuning on a small parallel set. We ask: what if moderate amounts of low-resource monolingual data are also available? We argue that, rather than continued pretraining, a more effective use of this data is the pre-LLM era technique of back-translation (BT). The current fine-tuned LLM translates monolingual sentences in each language, and the resulting pairs train it in the reverse direction. Updates on the parallel set are interleaved for stable learning. With 1K parallel pairs on Odia and Swahili, BT beats continued pretraining into the low-resource language by 7.7 to 16.4 XCOMET-XXL points in domain. With beam-decoded intermediate translations, it also beats a model with 10 time more parallel data. In-context examples retrieved from the parallel data further improve BT. We also analyze the source, quality and amount of monolingual text. Across five low-resource languages, with Hindi as a high-resource control, and two 3B backbones, BT improves translation into the low-resource language by 16 to 173% XCOMET-XXL over parallel-only fine-tuning. Blind human evaluation on Odia and Sanskrit agrees with the automatic metrics.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18818
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Divergent Paths: Learning an Outcome-Predictive Representation of LLM Agent Trajectories
2026-10-14 05:36:22Alexander Gill, Guram Gogia, Francisco Guzm\'anAbstract
In this work, we reframe agentic trajectories as paths through a shared embedding space of actions and environmental observations. We show that successful and failed rollouts of the same task separate in this space, with simple per-task discriminators predicting held-out rollout outcomes at up to 0.95 AUROC across three agent benchmarks and three policy models. To exploit this signal across tasks, we introduce Precog-RM, a transformer-based model that meta-learns a representation in which outcome prediction can be performed in a few-shot setting. We show that Precog-RM generalizes to unseen tasks and models, and gives confident predictions of trajectory success long before termination. Deployed as an early stopping controller for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on Tau2-Bench, Precog-RM cuts training FLOPs by up to 47.3\% while maintaining performance comparable to baseline GRPO.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19614
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Frame Evidence:A Benchmark for Reference Frames and Visual Evidence in Multi-Image Spatial Reasoning
2026-10-14 04:22:42Chunxi Luo, Qishuai Ding, Xingchen Peng, Hengwei Ye, Ke Zhang, Wenxin Lian, Tianyi Lu, Chunlong Yu, Zhenya LinAbstract
A spatial answer depends on the reference frame specified in language and its supporting visual evidence. Item accuracy alone obscures whether correctness persists when either changes. We introduce Frame Evidence, a benchmark of 320 matched triplets and 960 Chinese multiple-choice questions from captured and rendered scenes. One family compares three grounded reference frames over fixed images. The other pairs image deletion annotated as insufficient with answer-preserving addition. Joint metrics require correct answers across all three frames and paired evidence variants. Across 20 configurations on 288 held-out questions, GPT three-shot reaches 50.00\% item accuracy, but the best three-frame group accuracy is 5/48 (10.42\%), reached by GPT two-shot. Few-shot prompting and task-specific adaptation improve item accuracy without consistently improving joint correctness. Input controls show where images support matched success, while repeated executions reveal answer instability beneath similar scores.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19564
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Does Personalization Break Trust? Open-Set Rejection Calibration Under Few-Shot On-Device Intent Adaptation
2026-10-12 18:54:51Vaibhav Prajapati, Pushp GargAbstract
Always-on virtual assistants increasingly personalize on-device to new user-specific commands via few-shot fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA), but this adaptation is evaluated almost exclusively on whether it learns the new commands, not on whether the assistant can still recognize an input that matches none of its intents - the out-of-scope (OOS) rejection problem. We show that naive few-shot LoRA personalization degrades OOS-rejection AUROC (area under the ROC curve) on every one of five public intent-classification benchmarks (mean drop $0.055$--$0.258$, five seeds each), while in-scope accuracy is preserved. A scorer-invariant check shows part of this drop is an artifact of the standard confidence scorer's own miscalibration under adaptation, though a smaller, genuine effect remains under any scorer; we trace it to a measurable shrinkage of the embedding margin around known-intent regions (pooled Spearman rho=0.61$). A deployment-cheap fix is scoring rejection by Mahalanobis distance instead of softmax confidence without extra training/retraining recovers most of the lost quality on 3 of 5 datasets at no accuracy cost, beats two further OOD scoring baselines, and generalizes across shot count, LoRA rank, and a second base encoder. We report honestly where the fix falls short and release all code for reproducibility.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20652
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UDHRBench: Benchmarking Human Rights in Large Language Models
2026-10-10 20:59:28Alak Raad (Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar), Noreldin Morssy (Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar), Zeerak Suhail (Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar), Serin Atiani (Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Jordan), Mustafa Jarrar (Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar)Abstract
Large language models are increasingly deployed in contexts requiring adherence to ethical and legal norms, yet their alignment with internationally recognized human rights standards remains underexplored. We introduce UDHRBench, a large-scale benchmark for operationalising the evaluation of large language model compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The dataset comprises 1,124 human rights confronting questions covering all 30 articles and 4,496 responses from four large language models (ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, and Fanar), manually annotated by experts for alignment, with high inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa = 0.801$). Our analysis reveals systematic and non-trivial misalignments, showing that violations typically arise through seemingly rational reasoning: appeals to efficiency, risk management, or scientific neutrality, rather than explicit rejection of rights. We further propose an LLM-as-a-Judge framework for automated evaluation using zero-shot and few-shot prompting, achieving 89.8\% weighted F1-score in detecting human-rights misalignment, alongside a novel Alignment Leniency Score that quantifies how judge models resolve ambiguous cases. The dataset, annotations, and code will be released as open-source resources (this https URL).
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15179
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Predicting how model propensities generalize out of distribution
2026-10-10 14:10:07June Hunter, Lily Wen, Owen Terry, Johannes Taraz, Ben Cohen, Niels WarnckeAbstract
How do language models generalize from their training data? This is a central challenge for alignment: models reliably learn their training distribution given enough samples, but we want models that behave well when deployed in new contexts. We study out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of propensities. Our central experiment uses a range of elicitation techniques -- system prompting, few-shot learning, SFT on reference answers, and GRPO -- to increase a target propensity in a model, then measures how it spills over onto others across the resulting cross-elicitation matrices. We find that spillover is highly correlated between models when the same elicitation technique is used, but our SFT and GRPO runs induce different spillover profiles. Elicitation of benign traits can sometimes generalize towards undesired traits, for example a model trained to claim that it is sentient often becomes more power-seeking. We further find that spillover partially resembles trait correlations found in humans and identify three clusters of traits that account for about half of the variance using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Across many elicitation runs, we observe that models change in characteristic ways that don't depend on the targeted trait, a phenomenon we refer to as drift. Drift moves Qwen3.5-9B towards its base model. When investigating if LLMs are able to predict spillover, we find that Claude Opus 5.5 predicts spillover slightly better than the models themselves, but worse than data-driven approaches using alternative elicitation methods or models. Overall, no single dominant predictor emerges, and generalization remains hard to predict. Code and data are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14937
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OccludeBench: Can VLMs Find What's Missing?
2026-10-09 16:04:54Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Ryo Mitsuhashi, Linrong Cai, Xingyu Fu, Zhuang LiuAbstract
How well can vision-language models (VLMs) reason about what is missing from an image? We study this question with OccludeBench, a manually curated benchmark for recovering fully occluded objects from the visual evidence that remains. OccludeBench distinguishes direct cases, where the hidden object must be recovered from a specific physical cue such as a shadow or reflection, from inferential cases, where it can be inferred from broader scene context. Across five VLMs, accuracy averages 42.7% on direct cases versus 62.7% on inferential cases, exhibiting a 20.0-point gap. Humans attain higher accuracies of 63.4% versus 68.5% for direct and inferential images, respectively, with no significant gap. To locate this failure, we introduce OccludeTrace, a four-stage diagnostic that isolates where the visual reasoning process breaks down. The bottleneck emerges when models must recover the relevant object from the projection within the full image: they succeed on only 50% of failed examples, compared with 91% of examples they answer correctly. Extended reasoning, tool use, and few-shot prompting yield inconsistent improvements and do not reliably eliminate the gap. In contrast, an inpaint-then-confront intervention, which prompts models to first generate a candidate hidden object and then evaluate that hypothesis against the visible physical cue, reduces the gap to a statistically non-significant difference for both models with image-generation capabilities. Together, our results establish a tractable, controlled diagnostic for isolating how VLMs reason about visual content that is missing from an image.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13790
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AMLworld-Compact: Importance-Weighted Downsampling for Cost-Effective LLM Evaluation and Error Diagnosis
2026-10-09 14:09:32Natapong Nitarach, Phume Ngampornsukswadi, Pittawat Taveekitworachai, Surapon Nonesung, Warit Sirichotedumrong, Kunat PipatanakulAbstract
Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on AMLworld's smallest test splits is costly because each of over a million targets requires a separate graph prompt. Sampling reduces this cost, but small balanced subsets change unweighted precision and F1. We introduce AMLworld-Compact, an evaluation set that retains every illicit test transaction and samples benign transactions from supervised-score strata. Its HT-Coreset protocol reduces evaluation targets by 271x and 611x on HI-Small and LI-Small. Horvitz-Thompson weights give unbiased full-test confusion-count estimates for fixed predictions; recall is exact, while precision and F1 are ratio estimates. In a held-out study using Graph Feature Preprocessor (GFP) features, one boosted-tree family defines strata for evaluating the other over 500 draws per configuration. At the released sizes, F1 RMSE is 0.00-2.58 percentage points versus 4.44-7.41 for uniform sampling with HT weights; conservative intervals remain broad. Under the evaluated graph prompts, seven open-weight LLMs have weighted precision near the predict-all-illicit baseline. In an outcome-stratified audit of 1,000 HI-Small few-shot outputs from one run per model, lexical checks pass for 84.5% of correct and 56.2% of incorrect binary verdicts, so these markers do not establish correctness. We release the evaluation sets, construction code, and audit tools at this https URL and this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13627
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COFFEQA: Counterfactual-Guided Few-Shot Distillation for LLM Question Answering
2026-10-09 00:41:00Kavinda Kehelella, Sanghamitra DuttaAbstract
Knowledge distillation aims to train a smaller student model to mimic a larger teacher model for resource-constrained environments. However, the process of distillation is typically data-intensive and computationally expensive, particularly for generative tasks. Few-shot distillation offers an alternative by transferring teacher knowledge using limited training samples. However, we observe that few-shot distillation performance is heavily dependent on the choice of these training samples. In fact, we demonstrate that using more uncertain samples near the teacher's decision boundary can significantly deteriorate distillation performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose Counterfactual-guided Few-shot Distillation in Open-book Question Answering (COFFEQA), a novel strategy that aptly uses counterfactuals to provide additional supervision around challenging factual samples. In the generative QA setting, we define a counterfactual as a minimally modified context that induces the teacher to change its response to an alternative answer. We provide geometric insights on how factual-counterfactual pairs can constrain the deviation between the teacher's and student's decision boundaries. We further introduce a new metric, Context Following Difficulty (CFD) that further validates counterfactuals prior to distillation based on agreement with the intended alternative answer and dependence on the modified context. COFFEQA uses CFD-validated factual-counterfactual pairs for few-shot distillation. Experiments across five in-domain and three out-of-domain QA benchmarks using T5 and Qwen2.5 families show that COFFEQA outperforms factual-only distillation baselines under the same few-shot budget. For instance, on TriviaQA, COFFEQA improves over the factual-only baseline by 8.77 average EM points and 9.98 average F1 points under the T5 setting with 32 few-shot pairs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12837
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Mind the Temporal Gap: Evaluating Video Models for Temporal Understanding in Driving
2026-10-08 18:02:22Shiva Sreeram, Erfan Aasi, Tsun-Hsuan Wang, Alaa Maalouf, Daniela RusAbstract
Modern video-language models are increasingly treated as general-purpose video reasoners, yet it remains unclear whether they robustly capture temporal dynamics in safety-critical settings such as driving. We study this question through controlled ego-motion tasks that require identifying actions from driving videos. Across video-language models, we find that standard prompting, visual prompting, few-shot prompting, and chain-of-thought prompting remain unreliable and highly task- and model-dependent, with persistent class biases, although newer models show substantial task-specific few-shot gains. In contrast, lightweight LoRA finetuning and simple probes trained on intermediate visual features recover strong motion-discriminative performance, indicating that motion-relevant cues are often present inside the models but are not reliably used by the final video-to-language pathway. These results suggest that, in driving, current video-language models remain unreliable temporal reasoners and often behave more like frame-level, bias-driven recognizers than dependable temporal world models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12575
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DVLA-RL++: Dual-Level Vision-Language Alignment with Reinforcement Learning Gating for Few-Shot Learning
2026-10-08 15:01:47Wenhao Li, Xianjing Meng, Qiangchang Wang, Zhongyi Han, Yilong Yin, Liqiang NieAbstract
Few-shot learning aims to recognize novel categories from limited labeled examples. Recent studies incorporate textual semantics to compensate for limited visual observations and improve class representations. However, high image-text agreement may reflect both intrinsic object properties and incidental context, making support prototypes susceptible to contextual contamination. To address this problem, we propose DVLA-RL++, which extends DVLA-RL with complementary semantic purification (CSP) and counterfactual reinforcement-learning gating (CRG). Specifically, CSP generates intrinsic and nuisance descriptions from labeled supports and compares their agreement with each support token. An ambiguity-dependent rejection margin guides sparse evidence allocation, while an intrinsic semantic anchor fills the unassigned mass to provide a fallback when visual evidence is unreliable. CRG learns layer-wise semantic fusion strengths using a reward that balances recognition performance and nuisance exposure. An independently executed reference trajectory on the same episode provides a paired learning signal. Theoretical analysis relates retained evidence and anchor quality to prototype stability and establishes conditions for unbiased on-policy gradient estimation. Experiments on standard, fine-grained, and cross-domain benchmarks show state-of-the-art accuracy, with an average gain of 1.4% over DVLA-RL. The project page is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12095
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From Pixels to Structure: Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Document OCR and Structured JSON Extraction
2026-10-08 12:21:52Uddipan Basu Bir, Vincent Christlein, Andreas Maier, Mathias ZinnenAbstract
While massive, closed-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) set strong benchmarks for document understanding, their dependence on commercial APIs limits adoption in institutional archives due to data autonomy concerns, recurring costs, and the environmental footprint of hyperscale computing. This is especially acute in heritage digitization, where documents include historical handwriting, domain-specific terminology (e.g., jewelry, prehistory, architecture), and non-standard layouts requiring high-dimensional structured extraction. We present a comparative study of eight open-source lightweight VLMs (up to 7B parameters) for Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-to-structure across three university heritage collections. Given a document image, models must extract text and generate schema-compliant JSON, enabling automatic validation and downstream use. We evaluate models under a constraint-aware protocol across zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, measuring extraction fidelity and structured-output quality using Character Error Rate (CER), Approximate Normalized Levenshtein Similarity (ANLS*), and mean Average Precision F1 (mAP-F1). Against a fine-tuning baseline, we further test the independent impact of (i) hyperparameter optimization, (ii) classical image preprocessing (illumination flattening, denoising, and CLAHE), and (iii) multi-stage training. Finally, we analyze the trade-off between dataset-specific fine-tuning and a single multi-dataset checkpoint, where joint training enables one model to operate across collections but can shift performance between datasets. Overall, we show that carefully adapted VLMs with up to 7B parameters can provide a sustainable, private, high-performing alternative to manual transcription or commercial black-box systems, and we offer actionable guidance for heritage institutions seeking institution-controlled OCR-to-JSON extraction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11818
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