Represenation_Learning
-
Text-Guided Visual Dependency Graph Learning with Cross-Modal Attention Priors
2026-08-19 09:57:34Fei Wang, Yutong Zhang, Yang Ye, Jinxian Chen, Wang Wenshuai, Xiong WangAbstract
Estimating interpretable conditional-dependence structures from multimodal visual-linguistic features remains largely unexplored. We propose CM-GLasso (Cross-Modal Graphical Lasso), a framework that bridges vision-language representation learning and sparse Gaussian Graphical Models. CM-GLasso introduces three key components: (i) a text visualization strategy that renders class-attribute descriptions as images and processes them through the same SigLIP-2 vision encoder as natural images, yielding prototype-indexed patch-level attention footprints in a shared feature coordinate system; (ii) a cross-attention distillation mechanism that condenses high-dimensional patches into a small set of semantic graph nodes, whose attention-footprint similarities yield cross-modal structural priors for non-uniform L1 penalization; (iii) a joint ADMM formulation that estimates shared and class-specific precision components within a single convex objective, avoiding the need to first estimate and then decompose separate class-wise graphs. The learned sparse graph topologies directly support a parameter-free, precision-based classification rule and a lightweight topology-aware segmentation head. Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate that CM-GLasso achieves competitive or superior performance compared with strong feature-based and task-specific baselines. Under the matched controlled protocol, it attains the highest average classification accuracy (91.97%) and the highest segmentation mIoU among the controlled baselines on VOC (74.75%) and ADE20K (64.01%), while also yielding explicit sparse conditional-dependence graphs with common-specific decomposition.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21443
PDF
-
Composed Historical Image Retrieval by Modeling Temporal Representations
2026-08-19 08:48:21Adri\`a Molina Rodr\'iguez, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Josep Llad\'os CanetAbstract
While time evolves linearly, the geometry of neural embedding spaces is inherently multi-dimensional, often chaotic, and difficult to interpret. In principle, one could constrain an embedding space to a single temporal dimension; however, such a reduction would sacrifice performance on downstream tasks, as one-dimensional embeddings cannot retain sufficient expressive capacity. This paper asks whether it is possible to learn representations that preserve temporal structure while remaining effective for image and object retrieval, and answers this question by building the mathematical foundations of such a system. We propose Temporally Decomposable Image Representations (TDIR), a representation learning algorithm that decomposes historical photographs into separate date and content components through orthogonal subspaces. We define and prove the conditions under which such a decomposition is achievable, characterize the error incurred when those conditions are only partially met, and show that orthogonality between temporal and categorical subspaces emerges naturally from the joint optimization, without requiring it to be imposed explicitly. Beyond its geometric properties, TDIR enables a class of transitive operations on embedding spaces: the temporal information of one image can be extracted and injected into the representation of another, with no label supervision required. All theoretical properties are grounded and validated in the real-world problem of Composed Image Retrieval on historical photographs, where a query simultaneously specifies object content and a target time period, either through labels or through example images. This in-the-wild setting serves as a concrete backing for the propositions we derive, offering an intuitive and interpretable way to navigate photographic archives while maintaining competitive performance in both date estimation and object retrieval.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18694
PDF
-
Vision-Language Models for Egocentric Video: From Hand-Object Interaction to Embodied AI
2026-08-19 08:21:58Mohammad Zamani, Fatemeh ZiaeetabarAbstract
Egocentric video captures activities from the wearer's perspective, providing a direct view of human attention, hand--object interaction, and goal-directed behavior. This perspective is increasingly important for wearable intelligence, assistive systems, human--robot interaction, and embodied AI, yet it introduces challenges including ego-motion, occlusion, small active objects, viewpoint-dependent appearance, and long-range temporal dependencies. Vision--language models (VLMs) offer a promising foundation for addressing these challenges by linking visual observations with semantic knowledge and natural-language supervision. This survey presents a critical review of VLMs for egocentric video understanding, tracing the progression from conventional recognition architectures to multimodal foundation models and embodied systems. We organize the literature around tasks, datasets, hand--object interaction understanding, temporal reasoning, frame and clip selection, multimodal representation learning, prompting, semantic alignment, and model adaptation. Particular attention is given to graph-based and object-centric reasoning as mechanisms for modeling relations among hands, objects, actions, and scene context over time. We further examine how first-person perception and multimodal foundation models support wearable assistance, robot skill learning, human-to-robot transfer, and embodied decision making. Across the reviewed literature, a consistent limitation emerges: current models recognize visible objects more reliably than evolving interactions, actions, and user intent, especially over long activities. We therefore identify temporally grounded reasoning, interaction-aware supervision, efficient long-video processing, multimodal fusion, graph-enhanced representations, cross-domain generalization, privacy, and trustworthy evaluation as key priorities for deployable embodied intelligence.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18671
PDF
-
Primitive Representation Learning for Unsupervised Dynamic Contrast Enhanced MRI Reconstruction
2026-08-18 17:48:22Veronika Spieker, Wenqi Huang, Cemre Ariyurek, Liam Timms, Daniel Rueckert, Onur Afacan, Julia A. Schnabel, Sila KurugolAbstract
Reliable quantitative analysis of dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI requires high-quality spatiotemporal reconstructions at high undersampling rates. Scan-specific reconstructions using Gaussian and Gabor primitives have shown promising results without the need for large training datasets, but have not addressed the additional dimension of dynamic contrast. We propose a multi-dimensional, primitive based framework for dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI reconstruction that disentangles the underlying anatomy, the dynamic contrast enhancement, and residual motion into separate temporal basis functions, thereby enabling a geometrical interpretation of the representation. We show that this architecture achieves performance competitive with conventional reconstruction methods, both in reconstruction quality and in the accuracy of extracted aorta and kidney enhancement curves. The modular tier design extends naturally to additional dynamic factors and higher acceleration rates. Code available at this https URL 2026-GaborDCE-spieker.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18055
PDF
-
Continuity-Driven Representation Learning for Industrial Defect Detection
2026-08-18 04:31:55Minjong Kim, Hyun Jun Kim, Jeongrae Kim, Heeseung Shin, Changwon LimAbstract
Industrial defect detection differs from natural-image object detection because inspection images are captured under controlled conditions and contain large normal-dominant regions with repetitive structures. Defects therefore appear as localized disruptions of otherwise predictable patterns, while conventional detectors rely mainly on sparse bounding-box supervision, resulting in weakly constrained normal-region representations. We propose a continuity-driven representation regularization framework that exploits normal-dominant regions as dense auxiliary supervision. The framework introduces two detector-agnostic objectives: Multi-Continuity Loss, which combines 1D patch-sequence prediction and 2D masked spatial prediction, and Differencing Loss, which regularizes first-order feature variation and second-order curvature between neighboring patch embeddings. Both objectives are applied with box-derived region weighting to stabilize normal-region representations while preserving defect-related discontinuities. Experiments on two real-world industrial datasets and the public NEU-DET benchmark, using six detector architectures including YOLO-family models, MambaYOLO, and DETR, demonstrate consistent improvements over native detector baselines. In the full-data setting, the proposed regularizers improve average mAP@0.5:0.95 by up to 3.49 percentage points on Industrial Metal, 5.38 percentage points on MEA, and 5.03 percentage points on NEU-DET. Under limited-data conditions, the gains become more pronounced, with Differencing Loss achieving improvements of up to 21.07 percentage points in mAP@0.5 and 8.23 percentage points in mAP@0.5:0.95 on NEU-DET using only 25% of the training data. These results suggest that continuity-driven regularization provides an effective prior for improving industrial defect detection, particularly when annotated data are scarce.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17362
PDF
-
Mask What Matters: Saliency-Guided Video Self-Supervised Learning for Autonomous Driving
2026-08-17 22:39:49Christopher Lang, Alexander Braun, Abhinav ValadaAbstract
Video self-supervised learning through masked spatiotemporal prediction has emerged as a promising paradigm for learning feature representations from unlabeled data. However, existing methods typically rely on random masking, which indiscriminately removes regions irrespective of their semantic or temporal relevance. In ego-centric driving videos, this can weaken the pretext signal since safety-critical cues such as pedestrians, vehicles, lane boundaries, and dynamic interactions often occupy only a small portion of the frame, yet are central to downstream perception. We introduce V-JEPA4A, a domain-specialized variant of V-JEPA for autonomous driving that is pre-trained on publicly available driving videos with a novel saliency-driven masking policy. It accounts for semantically and temporally relevant context. The proposed policy preserves and predicts context according to semantic importance and temporal relevance, yielding more informative representation learning while retaining the efficiency of masked prediction. We evaluate the resulting encoders on four driving benchmarks spanning tracking, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation. The results demonstrate that V-JEPA4A reduces identity switches on BDD100k MOT by 25% over V-JEPA with random masking, achieves 73.2 mIoU on Cityscapes, and 3.75 RMSE on KITTI-2015 depth, while incurring only ~14% additional pre-training iteration overhead.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17178
PDF
-
DMM-Align: Closed-Loop Optimization for 2D-3D Registration with Dual-Role Diffusion
2026-08-17 15:01:25Chongjian Wang, Junjie GaoAbstract
2D-3D registration remains brittle in challenging scenarios such as low overlap, occlusion, repetitive structures, and severe cross-modal ambiguity. A key reason is that existing methods improve representation learning, correspondence estimation, or pose computation in isolation, while the dominant failure mode is inherently cross-level, where errors propagate between features, correspondences, and pose. To address this limitation, we propose DMM-Align: Diffusion-based Matching Matrix Alignment, a closed-loop framework that couples correspondence refinement, pose estimation, and representation learning through a shared differentiable geometric state. Our method leverages diffusion in two coordinated roles: a geometry-aware diffusion process refines the soft matching matrix for robust correspondence estimation, while a geometry-conditioned diffusion teacher injects pose-induced supervision back into feature learning. These processes are connected via a differentiable geometric hinge that converts correspondences into a global pose and exposes geometric inconsistency to upstream modules. Extensive experiments on 7-Scenes and RGB-D Scenes V2 demonstrate that DMM-Align consistently outperforms strong baselines, especially under low-overlap and heavy-occlusion conditions, highlighting the effectiveness of closed-loop geometric feedback for robust 2D-3D registration.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27794
PDF
-
Hypergraph-based Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Incremental Refinement
2026-08-17 14:30:09Shenao Chen, Yidan Xu, Xiangmin Han, Rundong Xue, Duanpo Wu, Yuhan Gao, Chenggang Yan, Yue GaoAbstract
Modern Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M-RAG) systems are fundamentally limited by the binary connectivity paradigm of traditional simple graphs, which fails to capture the intricate, high-order correlations among heterogeneous entities, such as the N-ary relationships between a visual chart, its scattered textual descriptions, and underlying numerical data. Furthermore, existing refinement strategies often rely on exhaustive, full-page reconstruction to align cross-modal information, leading to prohibitive computational redundancy and the introduction of contextual noise in long-form document processing. In this paper, we propose Hyper-M2RAG, a novel framework that redefines multimodal document retrieval through High-order Hypergraph Representation Learning. We first formalize the document structure as a Multimodal Hypergraph, utilizing hyperedges as unified semantic containers to encapsulate multi-way associations across text, images, and tables, thereby transcending point-to-point modeling. To mitigate semantic fragmentation caused by physical pagination, we introduce an Anchor-driven Incremental Refinement mechanism. Rather than performing a global sweep, our approach identifies boundary-crossing anchor nodes and reconstructs their local hyper-topology using one-hop neighborhood contexts. This targeted refinement effectively bridges cross-page knowledge gaps with minimal computational footprints. Extensive evaluations on multimodal benchmarking datasets demonstrate that Hyper-M2RAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both retrieval precision and generation coherence. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16628
PDF
-
Large language models as synthetic clinical experts to inform longitudinal rare-disease modeling
2026-08-17 12:47:18Clemens Sch\"achter, Astrid Pechmann, Janbernd Kirschner, Jan Hasenauer, Harald BinderAbstract
Due to the limited amount of information, modeling longitudinal rare-disease data can benefit from integrating clinical knowledge. Yet, elicitation of expert knowledge and formalization for model fitting is challenging, in particular due to limited time of clinical experts. To nevertheless make domain knowledge accessible during model fitting, we use large language models (LLMs) as synthetic clinical experts to supervise a variational-autoencoder-based approach that learns low-dimensional latent summaries of visit-level observations. Specifically, LLMs are queried offline on textual descriptions of patient observations to obtain judgments, e.g., the suspected clinical category. To improve the variational autoencoder fit, we train a differentiable surrogate model on these judgments and augment the loss function to encourage reconstructions that preserve the clinical-label distribution of their corresponding input profile. In an application to longitudinal motor-function assessments from children with spinal muscular atrophy, we map visit-level clinical profiles to low-dimensional representations that are linked by a multivariate mixed-effects model. The synthetic expert loss discourages reconstructions that remain numerically close in data space but alter the clinical interpretation of the reconstructed motor function profile, such as by crossing a disease-type boundary. We thus reduced disagreement between original and reconstructed SMA type labels from about 11 to 7 percent. Furthermore, informing the latent representation by the synthetic expert improved prediction of motor function milestones compared with unsupervised latent representations and a data-level baseline. These results suggest that incorporating LLMs into model fitting can make clinical knowledge available to representation learning and improve clinical faithfulness for longitudinal rare-disease data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16507
PDF
-
Understanding and Stabilizing Deep Q-Learning via Controlled Bootstrapping and Regulated Value Dynamics
2026-08-17 06:55:41Bozhou Chen, Yongyi Wang, Hanyu Liu, Xionghui Yang, Wenxin LiAbstract
Deep Q-learning (DQL) has achieved remarkable empirical success in reinforcement learning, yet its training process remains notoriously unstable. Existing studies often attribute instability to isolated factors such as overestimation bias or representation learning issues, lacking a unified understanding of how different sources of instability interact during recursive value estimation. In this work, we provide a systematic analysis of instability in deep Q-learning from three complementary perspectives: operator-level bias in Bellman bootstrapping, estimator-level sensitivity of greedy action selection to regression noise, and parameter-dynamics imbalance under aggressive data reuse. We identify a reward-triggered self-reinforcing trap and characteristic parameter spike dynamics, then derive stabilization principles for controlled bootstrapping, ensemble quantile estimation, and spike-based parameter regulation. Experiments on Atari-100K and Procgen demonstrate competitive performance and improved training stability.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16182
PDF
-
Unified Condition-Action Modeling for Accurate One-Step Action Generation
2026-08-17 06:14:16Xinyu Zhou, Zikun Cai, Kuangji Zuo, Gen Li, Boyu Ma, Yanshuo Lu, Yutong Song, Mingqi Yuan, Jiayu Chen, Jianfei YangAbstract
Robot manipulation requires policies that are both accurate and efficient, as robot control must respond to changing observations under tight latency constraints. Recent diffusion and flow policies are promising, but they often treat conditions as auxiliary signals rather than jointly evolving them with action trajectories. We find that this limitation can be effectively mitigated by a \textbf{simple yet effective unified condition-action modeling design} that represents conditions and actions in a shared token space, allowing a compact model to achieve high performance while improving both inference speed and accuracy. Therefore, we propose UCA-Flow, a unified condition-action modeling framework for accurate one-step action generation. Our method unifies observation conditions, timestep conditions, interval conditions, and action tokens into a single sequence, and processes them with a Unified Condition-Action Transformer for joint condition-action representation learning. As a result, condition representations are dynamically reconstructed according to the current generation stage, highlighting information most relevant for action refinement. Furthermore, we introduce an improved dual-pass supervision scheme over $u$ and $v$ for stronger optimization of unified condition-action modeling. UCA-Flow improves the average success rate by 9.3 percentage points over the strongest baseline, while achieving $45.6\times$ and $33.4\times$ speedups over DP3 and Simple DP3, and remaining $4.3\times$ and $2.3\times$ faster than one-step FlowPolicy and MP1, respectively.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16153
PDF
-
ConceptFormer: Learning Adaptive Latent Concepts for Query-Document Alignment in Visual Document Retrieval
2026-08-16 12:07:12Peng Chunyi, Xu Zhipeng, Yan Yukun, Liu Zhenghao, Yu Shi, Mei Sen, Sun Yubo, Zhang Yongheng, Zhou Jie, Gu Yu, Yu Ge, Sun MaosongAbstract
Visual document retrieval is a critical component of multimodal retrieval-augmented generation, aiming to identify query-relevant pages from document collections where evidence is distributed across text, layout, charts, and visual structures. Recent efforts toward finer-grained supervision primarily rely on textual descriptions or localized visual regions as evidence proxies. However, such supervision signals may either overlook complex visual structures or provide incomplete and inaccurate representations of the underlying evidence. To address these limitations, we propose ConceptFormer, a latent concept representation learning framework for visual document retrieval. ConceptFormer models query-relevant evidence as continuous, query-conditioned latent concepts that explicitly bridge localized visual evidence and semantic relevance, without requiring either textual intermediate representations or direct reliance on raw visual annotations. During training, ConceptFormer employs a strong vision-language model to dynamically determine the number of latent concept tokens and uses these concepts as an intermediate representation to bridge the semantic gap between queries and documents, thereby guiding the learning of the embedding space. Experiments on diverse visual document retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that ConceptFormer achieves 16.7\% and 22.1\% relative improvements in average NDCG@10 over the strongest visual retrieval baseline and the strongest OCR-based text retrieval baseline, respectively. Further analysis reveals that latent concepts effectively connect localized visual evidence with semantic relevance, enabling the retriever to capture both fine-grained textual cues and complex document-level visual structures while preserving strong retrieval alignment. Codes and data are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15698
PDF
-
When Is Shallow Enough? Adaptive Split Federated Learning with Client-Specific Sufficiency Estimation
2026-08-16 09:06:28Wenhao Yuan, Chenchen Lin, Wenhao Hu, Jian Chen, Jinfeng Xu, Shujie Li, Edith Cheuk Han NgaiAbstract
\textit{Split Federated Learning} (SFL) enables distributed model training by splitting networks between the server and clients. However, under client heterogeneity, the conventional static split strategy may be suboptimal because clients can differ in data distributions, adaptation dynamics, and representation learning progress, making a single split point insufficient to accommodate client-specific training states. In this paper, we propose \textsc{FedSGA}, a \textbf{S}ufficiency-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{A}daptive split \textbf{Fed}erated learning framework that addresses this question through client-specific shallow sufficiency estimation. First, we introduce a client-specific adaptation channel based on private prompt tokens, which tracks local adaptation dynamics separately from the shared backbone and provides a lightweight signal for detecting whether client adaptation remains active. To further avoid repeated online probing over multiple candidate depths, we design a shallow sufficiency estimator that combines cross-client semantic alignment, temporal interface stability, and prompt-state variation to estimate whether the shallowest split is already sufficient. Finally, we introduce a split-compatible interface harmonization module that projects activations from different split depths into a shared semantic space, improving the comparability of heterogeneous client interfaces before server-side prediction. Extensive experiments on multiple heterogeneous benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of \textsc{FedSGA} in improving model performance compared with state-of-the-art methods while reducing unnecessary client-side computation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15639
PDF
-
EA-LiteUNet: An Edge-Adaptive and Resource-Efficient U-Net for Boundary-Sensitive Dermoscopic Image Segmentation
2026-08-16 05:20:39Wang Jiangtao, Nur Intan Raihana Ruhaiyem, Fu Panpan, Yang Yu, Huang YanAbstract
Accurate boundary delineation remains a persistent challenge in dermoscopic image segmentation because of blurred lesion margins, heterogeneous textures, and complex background artifacts. From a signal-processing perspective, lesion boundaries represent high-frequency components that are highly susceptible to aliasing, noise amplification, and information loss. Consequently, repeated downsampling and feature transformations in conventional convolutional architectures often lead to severely degraded boundary representations. To address these limitations, we propose EA-LiteUNet, an edge-adaptive and computationally efficient U-Net variant specifically designed for boundary-sensitive medical image segmentation. The architecture integrates three core mechanisms: (1) boundary-aware representation learning to suppress aliasing and preserve high-frequency structural details; (2) attention-guided feature modulation to selectively enhance boundary-relevant responses across multi-scale features; and (3) a resource-adaptive inference strategy to dynamically balance segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations across three public dermoscopic datasets demonstrate that EA-LiteUNet consistently achieves superior boundary precision. Specifically, on the ISIC 2018 dataset, the method significantly reduces the 95% Hausdorff Distance (HD95) to 12.89 pixels while maintaining a robust Dice score of 92.08%. Notably, this strong performance is achieved with an ultralightweight configuration of merely 0.29M parameters and 1.17 GFLOPs. Ablation studies further validate the complementary effects of these components, confirming their contribution to enhanced boundary fidelity and stable optimization.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15537
PDF
-
A Network-driven Framework for Public Event Forecasting via Dynamic Interaction Network Evolution
2026-08-16 02:32:05Jie Wei, Yue Liu, Xiaochuan Tang, Biao Cai, Xiangtao Li, Yanmei HuAbstract
Effective public event forecasting is essential for intelligent service systems, enabling proactive risk management, adaptive resource allocation, and timely decision-making. In many real-world scenarios, the evolution of public events is driven by dynamic interactions among participants. Motivated by this observation, this paper proposes auto-ibDLM, a network-driven deep learning framework that represents events as dynamic interaction networks and predicts public event evolution through participant growth forecasting. The proposed framework adopts a hybrid representation learning strategy that first represents network evolution using network science-informed structural metrics and subsequently transforms the resulting structural feature vectors into compact and robust latent representations through an auto-learning layer. A GRU-based temporal forecasting module is then employed to capture temporal dependencies and predict future participant growth. Extensive experiments on 13 real-world public event datasets and two publicly available dynamic network datasets demonstrate that auto-ibDLM consistently outperforms representative state-of-the-art methods in both forecasting accuracy and generalization capability, achieving over 97% accuracy in public event forecasting. Comprehensive experimental analyses further validate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid representation learning strategy and demonstrate its representation-level interpretability. These results indicate that auto-ibDLM provides an effective and practical solution for intelligent public event forecasting.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15488
PDF
-
LightLoc++: Sensor-Robust Representation Learning for Efficient Outdoor LiDAR Localization
2026-08-15 16:50:34Wen Li, Shangshu Yu, Dunqiang Liu, Qiming Xia, Sheng Ao, Siqi Shen, Chenglu Wen, Cheng WangAbstract
Scene coordinate regression (SCR) achieves strong performance in outdoor LiDAR localization, but it usually requires scene-specific training that can take days, limiting practical deployment. Recent works improve training efficiency by decoupling SCR into a scene-agnostic backbone and scene-specific prediction heads, where the backbone is pretrained on source datasets and frozen for new scenes, and only lightweight heads are optimized. However, we find that this paradigm heavily depends on the pretrained backbone. Existing decoupled methods can match conventional SCR methods fully optimized for each new scene when LiDAR configurations are similar to those used during backbone pretraining, but their accuracy drops noticeably on datasets collected with different LiDAR sensors. This suggests that efficient LiDAR localization requires representations that capture stable scene geometry across LiDAR configurations. Motivated by this observation, we propose LightLoc++, a sensor-robust and efficient outdoor LiDAR localization framework. To support sensor-robust representation learning, we introduce SULID, a synchronized urban multi-LiDAR dataset with representative 32-, 64-, and 128-beam rotating LiDARs, extensive cross-sensor overlap, and diverse urban scenes. Using SULID, we pretrain a sensor-robust backbone through cross-sensor consistency learning. LightLoc++ further preserves efficient new-scene learning by incorporating sample classification guidance and redundant sample downsampling, which reduce regression ambiguity and computational redundancy in large-scale outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments on multiple outdoor LiDAR localization benchmarks demonstrate that LightLoc++ achieves state-of-the-art localization performance with the lowest new-scene training cost among compared methods. Code and dataset will be made available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15317
PDF
-
Earth Observation Foundation Models for Terrestrial Ecohydrology: From Representation Learning to Process Inference
2026-08-15 15:28:16Yi Yu, Jian Peng, Yucheng Lin, Trevor F. Keenan, Thomas F. A. BishopAbstract
Earth observation foundation models (EOFMs) are emerging as reusable representation frameworks for data-driven retrieval, prediction and process modelling within ecohydrology, which integrate EO, meteorological forcing and process models to characterise coupled water, energy and carbon dynamics in vegetation and soil across scales. However, there is yet to be an ecohydrology-specific synthesis assessing the EOFM relevance, application evidence or evaluation requirements under uncertain reference data, scale mismatch and temporal dependence. Here, we develop a framework for determining when EOFMs support interpretable inference and identify a mismatch between EOFMs and ecohydrological requirements. Firstly, an observation-to-inference hierarchy shows that relevance depends on target-specific sensing pathways, spatial-temporal support and traceable uncertainty. Secondly, a meta-analysis shows that pretraining is dominated by reflected optical and active-microwave data, with sparse thermal coverage and no passive-microwave-emission sources. Thirdly, our synthesis of ecohydrological applications finds strongest support for spatial context, label-efficient adaptation and hybrid workflows. Evidence declines with inference depth; independent validation of fluxes, coupled dynamics, event trajectories, calibrated uncertainty and decision benefits remains sparse. Fourthly, our benchmark audit finds stronger coverage of fair adaptation and reproducibility in general EOFM suites, and of process targets, direct reference evidence and distribution shifts in ecohydrological evaluations; physical consistency and uncertainty remain weakly assessed. These findings motivate a process-aware framework aligning EOFM design and evaluation with the target variable, observation pathway and process timescale, supporting trustworthy monitoring and interpretation of coupled water, energy and carbon dynamics.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15282
PDF
-
TAHB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Text-Attributed Hypergraph Learning
2026-08-15 06:02:20David Yoon Suk Kang, JungHyun Kim, Juhyun Jeon, Sang-Wook KimAbstract
Hypergraphs effectively model higher-order groupwise relationships beyond pairwise interactions, while pretrained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs) provide rich semantic understanding from textual attributes. However, research on combining language models with hypergraph learning remains limited due to the lack of public text-attributed hypergraph benchmarks. To address this limitation, we present TAHB (Text-Attributed Hypergraph Benchmark), the first public benchmark integrating hypergraph structures and raw textual attributes. TAHB contains 10 real-world datasets from four domains - e-commerce, academia, movies, and politics networks - enabling systematic evaluation of text-aware hypergraph representation learning. Experimental results show that TAHB preserves key structural properties of real-world hypergraphs and consistently reproduces performance tendencies observed in existing benchmarks. Furthermore, experiments under both LLM-as-Enhancer and LLM-as-Predictor settings demonstrate that LLM-enhanced textual semantics improve hypergraph learning performance, while structural and textual information jointly provide the best setting for LLM-based prediction. Our benchmark provides a foundation for future research at the intersection of hypergraph learning and language models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15055
PDF
-
RecipeNet: A Hierarchical Transformer for Recipe Data
2026-08-14 17:18:36Pin-Yen Huang, Sachin Chhabra, Prasanth Sai Gouripeddi, Abhinav Kumar, Baoxin LiAbstract
Recipe data arises in domains such as materials synthesis, pharmaceutical formulation, and industrial manufacturing, where procedures are represented as ordered sequences of steps containing heterogeneous structured fields. Existing tabular learning methods typically flatten this structure into fixed-schema representations, limiting their ability to capture hierarchical field interactions and procedural dependencies. We propose RecipeNet, a hierarchical Transformer architecture that encodes field-level interactions within each step and sequential dependencies across steps through stacked Transformer encoders. Experiments on multiple recipe datasets and tasks demonstrate that RecipeNet consistently outperforms existing tabular models, highlighting the value of hierarchical and sequential modeling for recipe representation learning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14505
PDF
-
Shift Aware Transfer Learning with Adaptive Dual-Encoder Fusion for PM Forecasting in Data-Limited Environments
2026-08-14 16:41:16Shahab Band, Hamed MohammadiAbstract
Short-horizon forecasting of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) remains difficult when observations from the target domain are limited and the statistical properties of the source and target domains differ. In these settings, models trained only on local data may not capture complex temporal dynamics, while direct transfer learning can result in negative transfer. This study develops a shift-aware dual-encoder transfer framework that combines source-domain knowledge with target-specific representation learning. The source encoder was pretrained using hourly observations from 10 U.S. monitoring locations. The framework was then adapted and evaluated using two years of hourly observations from 77 stations in Taiwan under a chronological train-validation-test protocol. Among the four principal baselines, the frozen-source dual-encoder model achieved the best performance, with MSE = 21.8960, MAE = 3.1597, and R^2 = 0.8725. This corresponds to an MSE reduction of approximately 7.1% relative to TL-v1 and 4.1% relative to TL-v2. The ablation analysis showed that removing the Taiwan-specific branch caused the largest decline in performance. Allowing the source encoder to adapt produced the best overall result, with MSE = 21.6575, MAE = 3.1383, and R^2 = 0.8739. SHAP analysis indicated that predictions were driven mainly by recent PM2.5 observations and meteorological variables related to pollutant transport and dispersion. These results suggest that source-domain knowledge is most effective when target-specific information is preserved and the transferred representation is allowed to adapt under target supervision.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14456
PDF
