WCE produces large-scale gastrointestinal image data yet pathological findings remain significantly underrepresented limiting the generalization performance of deep-learning based abnormality detection systems. SDG methods offer a practical solution to mitigate this imbalance. However their training directly on scarce abnormal samples often results in instability overfitting and structural distortions. Addressing these challenges requires controlled adaptation mechanisms that preserve anatomical priors while enabling realistic pathological variation. This paper presents EndoFSA a GAN-based model for Endoscopic Few-Shot image generation by Adaptation in WCE imaging. EndoFSA leverages a generator pretrained on abundant normal data and adapts it to abnormal domains using limited number of training samples through a rank-constrained parameter adaptation where only a small number of modulation parameters is updated while the pretrained weights remain frozen. By restricting parameter updates to a low dimensional subspace and incorporating perceptual boundary regularization and cluster-wise diversity control EndoFSA enables efficient model adaptation under limited data conditions and mitigates mode collapse while preserving the anatomical priors learned from normal data. Importantly EndoFSA operates without requiring pixel-level annotations, masks or bounding box supervision. Evaluation on publicly available WCE benchmark datasets spanning various abnormal categories demonstrates that EndoFSA generates abnormal images reproducing real lesions morphology. Moreover in a downstream classification task training an image classifier solely on synthetic abnormal images generated by EndoFSA yields performance comparable to that obtained with real images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29930
Speaker distance estimators are trained almost exclusively on simulated room acoustics, because real recordings annotated with the true talker-to-microphone distance are scarce. We show that models trained this way transfer poorly. On three real corpora we evaluate, simply predicting the average distance of the corpus is more accurate than any learned model. Then, we ask how few labelled real utterances are needed to make a frozen, synthetic-trained estimator useful, and study post-hoc calibration maps that rescale its output without gradients or retraining. An analysis of the achievable error shows that what the calibration is not limited by the absolute accuracy of the estimator, but how well it orders utterances by distance, since a constant bias or a wrong output scale is removed exactly by the calibration itself. Balancing this against the cost of estimating each coefficient from few samples yields a criterion that accounts for which map wins on which corpus and at which annotation budget, together with a shrinkage variant that requires no hard decision. Our findings suggest selecting synthetic checkpoints by linear correlation with true distances rather than by absolute error. Code, datasets, and analysis are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29203
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment unseen object categories with a few (e.g., one or five) labeled examples, enabling efficient adaptation to novel classes. Conventional models typically rely on appearance-based visual matching between support and query images for segmentation. While straightforward, these methods often struggle to handle significant appearance discrepancies and occlusions in the query image due to insufficient target knowledge. To mitigate this, we introduce a novel framework that mines target knowledge using the strong reasoning capacity of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and employs it to enhance FSS. Specifically, building on SAM 2, our method, named MK-FSS, exploits two forms of complementary knowledge derived from a query image by an MLLM for FSS, including spatial knowledge, which provides a spatial prior indicating the potential target location, and semantic knowledge, which describes the target using text. The spatial knowledge is first encoded into a memory representation, and then resulting memory is integrated with the support-guided memory feature from query image through a carefully designed dual-memory debate-fusion (DMDF) module, yielding a more robust target memory feature. In parallel, the semantic knowledge is encoded into the textual feature, which is fused with multi-scale query features via a progressive cross-modal prompt generator (PCPG), producing a target-aware multimodal prompt for segmentation. Working together, the dual-memory feature and the multimodal prompt provide a comprehensive representation of the target, enabling more robust segmentation. In our extensive experiments, MK-FSS shows promising results and largely surpasses existing methods. Code will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28949
At test time, large language models (LLMs) can encode historical information in activation memory (i.e., KV caches) and parametric memory (i.e., updated parameters). While activation memory is generally considered effective for factual recall and parametric memory for learning new tasks, their interplay remains unclear. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of memory in few-shot learning through controlled experiments. We find that activation memory is superior for recalling facts, whereas parametric memory does not consistently outperform activation memory in task learning. Moreover, our experiments show that the composite task, Conditional Arithmetic, requires the synergy of both memory types. Through neuron-level analysis, we find that the model activates distinct sets of neurons when accessing the same historical information through activation versus parametric memory. When both memory types are combined, the model recruits neurons from both sets, which is crucial for solving Conditional Arithmetic. These findings suggest that neither memory mechanism alone is sufficient for this composite task, highlighting the importance of their collaboration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28250
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in creative text generation, yet their ability to produce culturally grounded and stylistically constrained literary forms remains underexplored. Prior work has focused largely on modern language varieties and poetry, while classical prose traditions such as maqama remain largely unstudied. The maqama is a classical literary genre characterized by rhymed prose (saj), dense rhetorical ornamentation, and episodic narrative structure, making it a challenging testbed for evaluating whether LLMs can move beyond surface fluency toward deeper literary competence. In this paper, we present the first controlled evaluation study of maqama generation with LLMs, comparing five models under zero-shot, few-shot, and rule-based prompting, and evaluating outputs through both human annotation and an LLM-as-a-judge framework across dimensions such as rhetorical richness, saj density, structural coherence, and stylistic authenticity. Our results show that prompting strategy plays a strong role in stylistic quality: few-shot prompting most consistently improves saj density, while its effects on rhetoric and coherence vary by model, with the strongest models (GPT-4o and GPT-5.4-mini) benefiting most from rule-based prompting on these dimensions, though zero-shot prompting yields the highest aggregate scores across all five models. We further observe systematic differences between models in stylistic alignment with Arabic maqama conventions, and corroborate our findings with a second independent LLM judge, paired statistical significance testing, and non-LLM proxy measures of saj.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.28245
Pathology vision-language foundation models vary in performance across diseases and tasks, with no single model consistently performing best. The high cost of expert pathology annotation can also limit the labeled data available for task-specific adaptation. Combining complementary pretrained representations is a potential approach to these limitations, yet learning an effective fusion from few labeled examples remains challenging. We introduce Few-shot Fusion Foundation Models of Computational Pathology (FFM-CP), which is a framework that combines multiple pathology vision-language models in the few-shot learning setting. The framework first aligns heterogeneous representations using a closed-form Orthogonal Procrustes transformation estimated from corresponding support images. This alignment preserves within-model feature geometry without training an additional alignment network. Within the aligned space, a unified graph enables information exchange across backbones by jointly refining support-image features and visual and textual class prototypes. These refined representations support complementary text-prototype and case-retrieval branches that capture semantic class knowledge and within-class visual variation, respectively. Each branch learns to combine predictions from all ordered backbone pairs, allowing queries encoded by one model to draw on evidence represented by another. We evaluate three backbone combinations on six histopathology datasets at 4, 8, and 16 shots per class. FFM-CP achieves higher mean macro-F1 than the strongest individually adapted member of each fused set in 50 of 54 comparisons. These findings suggest that combining complementary pretrained representations can improve histopathological classification when annotations are limited.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27710
Text-to-speech systems increasingly process user-generated text (UGT) such as ppl and imo, whose pronunciation must be inferred from the canonical rather than surface form. We introduce UGTPhon, the first grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) benchmark for UGT in English, Vietnamese, and Korean, together with an inference-grounded taxonomy for fine-grained diagnosis. Existing G2P models and frontier LLMs exhibit a systematic canonical-to-non-canonical performance gap, reaching up to 66.8 PER points. As a benchmark baseline, we propose a simple compositional G2P approach that incorporates canonical-form evidence through exact-match lookup and staged decoding. Across matched ByT5 and Qwen2.5-0.5B backbones, explicit canonical-form modeling consistently reduces non-canonical G2P errors. The 0.5B variant also performs competitively with much larger few-shot frontier LLMs, highlighting the benefit of explicitly modeling canonical-form inference for UGT phonemization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27205
The performance of large language model (LLM) workflows often depends on selecting a small set of in-context demonstrations to guide model behavior on new tasks. Recent methods improve this process by augmenting prompts with successful reasoning paths. However, their demonstration selection relies on random sampling or metric-based rankings, overlooking the semantic structure of the task. We propose ClusterFewshot, a strategy that combines semantic structuring with utility-aware scoring to construct representative and effective few-shot demonstration sets. Evaluated within DSPy-based pipelines, ClusterFewshot substantially reduces optimization cost across multiple benchmarks, while consistently improving accuracy relative to prior bootstrap-based methods in both standalone prompt tuning and hybrid prompt-weight optimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25939
Vision-based gesture control accepts commands from any hand in the camera field of view, which is unsafe in shared indoor spaces. This paper presents IGate, an identity-gated control stack that includes gesture control and face tracking, in which commands are admitted only when an enrolled operator is verified. The system performs few-shot user enrolment from 20 initial face frames, without prior user-specific training: verification compares an embedding of the current face crop against the enrolled template by cosine similarity, while face tracking uses proportional correction. Gesture control is achieved by classifying extracted hand landmarks using an RBF-SVM trained on a custom dataset. Additionally, a hierarchical finite-state machine handles mode selection, default, and fallback behaviours. The approach is tested on a DJI Tello EDU, each component evaluated offline and in-flight across 270 trials (149 flown). Face verification yields a 0.32% offline equal error rate versus 19.3% in-flight. Under hover-locked conditions, the RBF-SVM gesture classifier outperforms the geometric rule (0.850 vs. 0.651 accuracy), with 82% of this gap stemming from the depth channel. All logs and reproduction scripts will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25511
Tone languages constitute over 50-70% of the world's languages, but the vast majority are low-resource, lacking the large transcribed corpora needed for automatic tone classification. Existing datasets are typically collected at the sentence level, whereas field linguists require fine-grained syllable-level annotations. We propose ToneCL, a lightweight contrastive learning framework for few-shot syllable-level tone classification. We simulate low-resource conditions on Mandarin and Vietnamese, limiting labeled data to tens of examples per tone class. ToneCL is pretrained on unlabeled speech with augmentations that preserve tonal identity, then fine-tuned on few-shot examples. Experiments show our method consistently outperforms baselines, achieving 91.6% on six-speaker Mandarin at 10 shots. Cross-lingual transfer is also effective: pretraining on Vietnamese and fine-tuning on Mandarin reaches 91.0\% accuracy at 10 shots. Ablation confirms that frequency band rejection is the most critical augmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24903
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in cybersecurity, where accurate analysis often requires multi-step and context-dependent reasoning over complex and heterogeneous data. However, existing prompting approaches typically focus on eliciting reasoning without explicitly considering how intermediate reasoning steps are structurally organized. We introduce Security Reasoning Topology, which models reasoning through three representative structures: Linear, Branching, and Graph. To evaluate their effects, we conduct controlled experiments on three cybersecurity datasets covering MITRE ATT&CK network traffic, cyber threat intelligence (CTI), and CVE vulnerability analysis. We evaluate multiple LLMs, including Llama 2 (7B, 13B, 70B), GPT-5.1, and Mistral Large 3, while keeping task inputs consistent and controlling reasoning structure through system-level prompting. Results show that reasoning topology substantially affects performance: Graph reasoning achieves the highest overall accuracy, improving over few-shot prompting by 9.8-12.2 percentage points across datasets, while Branching provides a strong intermediate solution. The results further show that the effect of reasoning topology remains consistent across model families and scales, highlighting reasoning topology as an important design factor for LLM-based cybersecurity analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24710
Readability assessment is essential for tailoring texts to intended audiences across educational, healthcare, and information retrieval domains. However, traditional readability formulas struggle to generalize across genres and languages, while supervised machine learning models rely on scarce, domain-specific annotated corpora, limiting their applicability--particularly for less-resourced languages. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a highly scalable, multilingual alternative that requires no task-specific training, yet the impact of advanced prompting strategies on their performance remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic benchmark of diverse open-source LLMs for multilingual readability assessment, focusing on the prediction of discrete readability levels required by educational frameworks. In addition to English, we evaluate our approach on a less-resourced language, Slovenian, to establish whether LLMs remain effective in low-resource settings. Specifically, we investigate the influence of explicit reasoning, demonstrating that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and reasoning-oriented models yield significant improvements over direct answering. Furthermore, our exploration of few-shot in-context learning reveals that providing just one labelled example per category (1-shot) substantially enhances prediction quality compared to zero-shot settings, with additional examples offering diminishing returns. By comprehensively comparing these approaches against traditional unsupervised metrics and state-of-the-art supervised baselines, we establish the viability of out-of-the-box LLMs as robust, cross-lingual readability assessors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24650
How should natural language processing models be selected and adapted for global health literature in environments where annotated data and computational resources are limited? This thesis investigates these challenges through experiments on semantic tag discovery, named entity recognition (NER), and multi-label topic classification. First, skip-gram word2vec models trained on progressively larger specialized corpora are compared with BioWordVec to assess how corpus size and domain context influence tag discovery. Vocabulary coverage and qualitative evaluation indicate that broader coverage does not necessarily yield more useful domain-specific associations. The analysis then turns to entity extraction, comparing convolutional spaCy models with a RoBERTa-based transformer on 1,000 annotated sentences. Under a lenient scoring protocol, the transformer achieves 0.80 micro-F1 versus 0.65-0.69 for convolutional models, but takes 82 seconds rather than 5-6 seconds. This trade-off motivates fine-tuning convolutional models and integrating a disease recognizer that achieves 81.33% test F1 on the NCBI Disease Corpus. Combined with PDF preprocessing, entity filtering, and MeSH enrichment, the resulting pipeline supports document-level indexing. To complement entity extraction with thematic annotation, MiniLM-based few-shot classification is compared with BART-MNLI zero-shot inference across 50 topics and 1,000 handcrafted test sentences. BART-MNLI achieves 95.2% single-label accuracy versus 59%; reported multi-label accuracies are 88% and 32% under partly manual assessment. However, its higher inference cost limits practical integration. The results show where domain specialization and lightweight adaptation offer practical value, and where transformer accuracy justifies higher inference costs, providing an empirical basis for building knowledge systems under resource constraints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24625
In-context learning (ICL) based on large language models (LLMs) has shown promising potential in alleviating performance bottlenecks caused by the limited availability of annotated data in Named Entity Recognition (NER). However, existing methods still face issues of retrieval misalignment and generation uncertainty, making their performance heavily dependent on the LLM's capabilities. As the parameter scale of LLMs decreases, their performance in few-shot settings deteriorates significantly. In this paper, we propose a novel unified retrieval-augmented framework, URA-NER, including three key components: Progressive Granularity Retrieval (PGR), Model-aware Representation Enhancement (MaRE), and Reason-aware Knowledge Verification. PGR is a two-stage retrieval mechanism that achieves stage alignment. It first retrieves demonstrations for span detection based on the query's global semantics, and then for type classification based on the specific entity context, providing fine-grained local information. Moreover, MaRE employs entity pre-recognition to guide the construction of representations, ensuring the query and demonstrations are aligned within the LLM's semantic space and attention pattern. In addition, to mitigate generation uncertainty, we propose RaKV, a closed-loop "generation-retrieval-verification" process. It explicates the LLM's reasoning paths, leverages them for the retrieval of external knowledge, and reorganizes the knowledge into verification evidence aligned with the original reasoning paths. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple low-resource NER datasets. Results demonstrate that URA-NER significantly enhances the performance of LLMs under low-resource settings, with particularly pronounced gains for smaller LLMs, achieving new state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24372
Large language models (LLMs), when acting as agents, are expected to take observed data in context, infer the latent state space underlying the world, and leverage it for downstream prediction. However, prior work demonstrated that LLMs struggle to use representations learned in context on a graph tracking task, where the model needs to construct a representation of the graph governing data generation process and use it for subsequent predictions. In this paper, we show that extending this to few-shot settings, where each demonstration is generated from a different world with either the same or different graph topologies, enhances its prediction on 6 models from 4 model families. To understand this improvement, we linearly probe a low-dimensional world representation that encodes graph information in the hidden states. Notably, we find that few-shot demonstrations relocate the world representation and increase its predictive use. Specifically, for each model, these world representations shift in directions nearly orthogonal to their original subspace, and interventions on these representations selectively impair performance more than interventions on other subspaces. Consistent with this insight, we show that few-shot demonstrations with observations from different worlds improve performance on ARC-AGI-1&2, web agent tasks, and Othello. Our findings elucidate the role and internal mechanisms of few-shot demonstrations in in-context world modeling. More broadly, our work advances our understanding of how LLM agents learn from in-context observations and provides implications for their further improvement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24352
World models aim to capture environmental dynamics and predict future trajectories, showing growing potential for embodied intelligence. Physics-informed 4D generation integrates physical simulation to predict 3D object interactions, offering a promising pathway toward world models. However, this paradigm relies on manually imposed dynamical assumptions rather than internalizing world dynamics, and thus still leaves a gap toward a true world model. To bridge this gap, we propose NeuIDO, a novel world dynamics modeling framework that learns a unified intrinsic dynamics representation from visual observations, advancing physics-informed 4D generation toward a world model. Specifically, we formulate world modeling as a neural operator learning problem and introduce a two-stage training strategy to learn a generalizable mapping from the visual observation distribution to the intrinsic dynamics distribution. Building on this observation-dynamics mapping, NeuIDO enables zero-shot dynamics inference directly from videos and can be further aligned with complex real-world dynamics via few-shot adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuIDO effectively unifies the intrinsic dynamics underlying diverse visual observations into a shared representation and rapidly infers dynamics in novel scenes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24313
Few-shot recognition with frozen visual features is especially fragile under domain shift and one-shot supervision, where a single labelled image is an unreliable estimate of its class. We ask how far this fragility can be reduced purely at test time, without retraining the encoder or augmenting the source domain. We present Spectral Transductive Refinement (STR), a training-free transductive inference rule that exploits the geometry of the complete support-query episode. Given frozen embeddings, STR builds a joint k-nearest-neighbour graph, maps the episode into a normalized-Laplacian spectral coordinate system, initializes class representatives from the labelled support, and iteratively refines them using pseudo-labelled queries. We evaluate STR under two protocols. A controlled component study with frozen ResNet-18 features shows that spectral refinement consistently improves over single-prototype spectral initialization across five shifted domains, with the largest gains in the one-shot regime where support estimates are weakest. We then benchmark STR against recent Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) methods using the standard miniImageNet-pretrained ResNet-10 backbone over eight established target domains. Operating entirely at inference time, STR attains the highest 1-shot average among compared methods and remains competitive at 5-shot, rivalling approaches relying on heavy source-domain meta-training augmentations. Because STR is transductive, we report its setting explicitly. Diagnostics attribute its gains to iterative refinement in spectral coordinates rather than added prototype capacity, which remains inactive in our configuration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23758
Recent advances in Physical AI have accelerated the use of foundation models in autonomous systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which must perceive, reason, plan, and act in dynamic environments. Existing benchmarks assess physical perception, intuitive physics, embodied navigation, and collaborative reasoning, but rarely evaluate the agentic decision-making required for reliable autonomy. We introduce \textit{PhysAI-Bench}, a benchmark for evaluating this capability. It contains 10,178 standardized decision instances automatically extracted from conversational traces of autonomous UAV missions. Each instance preserves mission context, temporal dependencies, physical constraints, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool calls, Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions, sensor observations, and AI-native 6G network conditions, including latency, packet loss, throughput, edge load, and network slicing. We expose only information preceding each decision, preventing future-event leakage and approximating online decision-making. We evaluate 29 foundation models using a two-stage protocol. We select model-specific configurations from 12 combinations of zero-, three-, and five-shot prompting and four temperatures, tested in three runs on a 35-instance, human-verified development set. We then freeze each selected configuration and evaluate it in three runs on a fixed, episode-disjoint set of 500 instances. GPT-5.3 achieves the highest accuracy (52.00%), followed by GPT-5.2 (49.40%) and Grok~4.5 (49.07%). Few-shot prompting generally improves performance, while temperature has limited influence. The results demonstrate that reliable agentic decision-making in Physical AI remains an open challenge. The dataset is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23695
Similarity-based retrieval is the dominant rule for conditioning large language models (LLMs) in in-context learning, retrieval-augmented generation, and prompt-based time series forecasting. The rule concentrates on near-duplicate candidates, an issue that has motivated diversity-aware retrieval but remains unexamined in other retrieval-conditioned pipelines. We study this issue using prompt-based time series forecasting as a test bed, where a learned prompt pool is retrieved by similarity. Dominant methods in this setting retrieve top-K entries by cosine similarity without redundancy control, producing a bias toward dominant temporal patterns while overlooking rare but informative events. We propose CASP-LLM, a coverage-aware semantic prompting framework that addresses this prompt selection bias by combining usage-tracking and saturating-gate techniques into a coverage regularizer that adds no learnable parameters. On six long-term benchmarks and the M4 short-term benchmark, CASP-LLM matches or improves on similarity-based LLM forecasters on most dataset-horizon settings, with the exceptions of Electricity, M4-Monthly, and the few-shot long-horizon setting. A controlled study locates the failure mode at the cross-batch usage level rather than per-retrieval redundancy: within-retrieval diversification such as MMR does not help, whereas regularizing anchor usage across training does.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22977
Clinical domain classification plays an important role in organizing and analyzing large volumes of unstructured medical text. However, medical transcription datasets are often highly imbalanced, which can substantially degrade classification performance, particularly for underrepresented clinical specialties. In this work, we present a comparative study of machine learning and transformer-based approaches for clinical domain classification from medical transcriptions. We evaluate six traditional machine learning classifiers---Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and XGBoost---along with two pretrained transformer models, BERT and XLNet, and a few-shot large language model prompting approach. Experiments are conducted on medical transcription data collected from MTSamples, comprising 5,013 samples across 40 clinical specialties. To address severe class imbalance, we investigate two balancing strategies: text augmentation using NLP-based synonym replacement and Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE). Experimental results demonstrate that data balancing substantially improves classification performance across the evaluated models. In particular, BERT achieves the highest F1-score of 0.996 on the SMOTE-balanced dataset while requiring lower training time than XLNet. The results highlight the effectiveness of transformer-based representations combined with appropriate data balancing strategies for clinical domain classification and provide a systematic comparison of classical machine learning, transformer models, and few-shot prompting for medical transcription analysis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22734