This paper describes the SKstars submission to SHROOM-Visions 2026, a shared task on fine-grained hallucination detection in large vision-language model outputs. The task requires systems to identify hallucinated character spans, assign hallucination categories, and provide confidence estimates for their predictions. Our approach combines zero-shot predictions from Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct with those of a LoRA-adapted Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct model. The outputs of the two models are integrated through a lightweight ensemble procedure, followed by span refinement and confidence adjustment. We evaluate the main system components on a small internal development subset and report the performance of the submitted system on the official English test set. SKstars achieved a Cor+Lbl score of 0.2902, ranking 15th among 29 teams, and obtained Cor and IoU scores of 0.3642 and 0.3151, respectively, ranking 18th on both metrics. The results show that combining a large zero-shot model with a smaller adapted model provides a practical framework for multilingual and fine-grained hallucination localization, while also highlighting the difficulty of transferring development-set improvements to hidden test data. Code and predictions: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24198
Visual search on large e-commerce catalogs must serve both "similarity" queries that ask for items resembling an uploaded image and "modifier" queries that comprise an image and text describing a desired modification (e.g. a color change or style swap). The latter is the setting known as composed image retrieval (CIR). Existing CIR methods, however, treat relevance as binary and train on triplets with a single positive target - a poor fit for real catalogs where many candidates partially satisfy a user query and ranking across that partial-match spectrum drives the customer experience. We propose a methodology for training CIR retrievers on graded relevance, consisting of: (i) a VLM to curate training data, generating both queries (object detection + modifier synthesis) and 4-level relevance labels without manual annotation, (ii) an iterative relevance-feedback loop that expands the training set by mining hard negatives from the in-training retriever, and (iii) a hierarchy-aware angular objective to train the retriever directly on the graded labels rather than collapsing them to a binary split. We call this methodology GradCIR and instantiate it on a PaliGemma2 bi-encoder trained on 3.5M graded pairs curated from raw Walmart catalog data. A controlled graded-vs-binary ablation isolates the supervision granularity and shows lift of 4.9%-5.9% in NDCG@10. The same recipe applied to other multimodal encoders lifts early-fusion backbones by up to 8.5% NDCG@10. On the public FashionIQ benchmark, GradCIR (applied to PaliGemma2) reaches 0.6703 average recall when fine-tuned, slightly ahead of the strongest peer-reviewed supervised baseline we compare against, and matching or exceeding all published CLIP-L-class zero-shot CIR methods. The system is deployed in production at Walmart, where it's serving live visual-search user traffic.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24152
Zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval requires robust alignment between noisy EEG responses and visual representations. Existing EEG-vision alignment methods often operate in sensor space and apply fixed visual supervision to all responses, ignoring both spatial mixing in scalp EEG and response-wise variability in alignment reliability. We propose an adaptive cortically constrained EEG-vision alignment method for zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval. The method reconstructs EEG responses into predefined ROI-level source-pattern representations and encodes them with a Neuro-ROI Attention Encoder. To handle response-wise variability, we introduce an evidence-based adaptive visual supervision strategy that weights detail-controlled visual targets using model-based alignment evidence. On THINGS-EEG, the proposed method achieves strong 200-way zero-shot retrieval performance, with ROI-level attribution providing post hoc interpretability of the learned source-pattern representations. These results show that cortically constrained representation learning and adaptive supervision can jointly support EEG-vision alignment for zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24109
Intermittent visual loss disrupts target-relative feedback during underwater orbiting, making it difficult to maintain coordinated motion and reacquire a moving target. We present AquaOrbit, a reinforcement-learning controller with a recovery module for underwater target orbiting under interrupted visual feedback. During detection loss, the recovery module uses latched line-of-sight, roll, and depth references to support stabilization and target reacquisition. We train the controller in Isaac Sim with dynamics, observation, and vision-loss randomization. Evaluated without retraining in Gazebo/ROS2 under a different physics engine and perception perturbations, AquaOrbit completes 20/20 orbiting trials in each of the static- and moving-target conditions on an unseen variable-depth 3-D trajectory. In the moving-target condition, it reduces mean line-of-sight error by approximately 46% relative to a PID-based visual servoing controller with recovery while maintaining comparable path-tracking accuracy; removing the recovery module reduces completion to 9/20. Zero-shot physical deployment with fully onboard perception and control demonstrates elliptical, figure-eight, and variable-depth circular trajectories, including the latter two trajectory types absent from training. The robot maintains attitude stability during manual occlusions lasting up to 8s and reacquires the target within 2.5s in the reported attitude-induced field-of-view loss events.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24054
The rapid growth of resident space objects is increasing the complexity of space situational awareness sensor tasking, challenging classical optimization methods as they allocate finite, heterogeneous, and distributed sensing resources across ever-larger catalogues. Existing deep reinforcement learning approaches show promise in reduced settings, but fixed-dimensional state and action representations limit their ability to scale to large, dynamic catalogues and distributed sensing networks. We introduce VISTA (Variable-Entity Intelligent Sensor Tasking Architecture), a scalable deep reinforcement learning architecture for persistent uncertainty-driven catalogue maintenance across variable object populations and sensor configurations. VISTA combines physics- and mission-informed top-K retrieval with entity-centric attention, recurrent memory, and pointer-based action decoding, thereby keeping each agent's observation and action spaces independent of catalogue size. We evaluate VISTA across different scenarios, from fixed-size single-sensor benchmarks to large-scale space-based tasking and heterogeneous cooperative sensing. With 30 orbiting targets, VISTA recovers the catalogue 31.2% faster than the fixed-dimensional recurrent baseline. In the large-scale regime, VISTA reduces five-hour uncertainty by 97.5% relative to the strongest classical reference and by 99.3% relative to the recurrent learner. Zero-shot tests up to 20,000 objects reveal near-linear relations between sensing capacity, catalogue size, and recovery horizon. Learned policies also exhibit sensor modality adaptation and generalization to population and initial-uncertainty shifts. Together, these results demonstrate that VISTA provides a scalable framework for adaptive space situational awareness sensor tasking across large, distributed networks of heterogeneous ground- and space-based sensors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23875
Automated grading of conjunctival photographs could reduce the cost and variability of trachoma prevalence surveys, but the relative value of modern pretrained visual representations, lightweight feature adaptation, and training-objective design has not been established under a common protocol. This study presents a controlled evaluation for binary classification of Trachomatous Inflammation-Follicular (TF) versus Normal using 1,546 images from the public UCSF/Lietman collection. Images are processed using the OPTED pipeline for zero-shot tarsal-conjunctiva segmentation, alignment, cropping, and standardization. We first compare six pretrained backbones using a common classification pipeline and then evaluate four lightweight adaptation mechanisms on DINOv2 ViT-B/14. Under stratified five-fold cross-validation, DINOv2 with Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) and focal-plus-center loss achieved 91.66 +/- 0.97% accuracy, 90.69 +/- 1.10% macro-F1, and 96.06 +/- 0.71% AUC. ECA introduces only five learnable parameters while matching the performance of substantially larger alternatives. Objective ablation further showed that ECA did not consistently improve plain DINOv2 across loss functions; the lowest-variance 91.66% accuracy was obtained with cross-entropy plus center loss. Overall, the fine-tuned DINOv2 representation provided most of the predictive performance, while ECA offered a highly parameter-efficient refinement whose effect depended on the training objective. The resulting workflow provides a reproducible benchmark for active trachoma image classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23832
Egocentric human data provide a principled source of supervision for learning dexterous robot manipulation. Unlike prior approaches that often collect such data in constrained or specially constructed environments, we collect in-the-wild egocentric demonstrations in real-world settings, including homes, factories, and pharmacies, etc., where people perform their ordinary tasks while wearing head-mounted cameras. This collection protocol captures diverse workflows and hand-object interactions across long-tailed object and skill distributions, but also yields visually challenging observations due to scene clutter and head-motion-induced viewpoint changes (a mean cumulative rotation of $15.93^{\circ}$/s). To address these issues, we introduce EgoWild2Dex, which transfers in-the-wild ego-human experience to dual-arm robots with dexterous hands by jointly aligning unstable egocentric views and human motions with robot observations and actions, respectively. This work offers three benefits. First, we introduce GeoFormer, a differentiable geometric transformer that warps noisy human observations toward robot observations. Second, we design a human-robot training scheme to bridge the embodiment gap, enabling high task success with limited robot supervision. Third, we release EgoWild, a 538.9-hour in-the-wild egocentric human dataset comprising 179,049 episodes, 125,961 unique task descriptions, and 1,282 object categories. On real robots, EgoWild2Dex achieves an average success rate of 96.7% across three long-horizon bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks and an average object-level zero-shot success rate of 33.3%. The data, models, and code will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23755
The rapid maturation of zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) models has turned high-quality voice cloning into a widely available capability, raising acute concerns over unauthorised replication, fine-tuning and resale of proprietary speech models. Yet ownership verification for TTS remains largely open: speech is a continuous waveform whose perturbations are easily destroyed by routine signal processing, and the human auditory system imposes a much tighter perceptual budget than vision. We present \textbf{TTS-Guard}, a black-box ownership verification framework for TTS models built on \emph{adversarial speaker-pair fingerprints}. TTS-Guard(i) selects key speaker pairs in a \emph{dual} embedding space for architecture-agnostic stealth;(ii) optimises a perturbation through an \emph{adaptive curriculum} of shadow models covering fine-tuning, pruning, quantisation and distillation; and (iii) aggregates black-box queries into a calibrated \emph{Verification Confidence Score}. On five mainstream TTS systems, TTS-Guard reaches an average Fingerprint Success Rate of $96.4\%$ at a False Positive Rate of $5.8\%$, while preserving intelligibility and naturalness. The fingerprint remains effective against ten audio attacks, six model modifications, and two state-of-the-art adversarial purifiers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23729
Open-world deployment requires humanoid robots to cross highly heterogeneous terrain safely, with perception that simultaneously provides wide coverage, local accuracy, and redundancy against sensor failure. Existing approaches struggle to satisfy all three: one forward depth camera or nearby height sampling covers too little; odometry-corrected elevation maps drift under aggressive motion and miss thin vertical structures; image-level encoding costs grow with camera count. We present UniPoint, a humanoid whole-body locomotion framework built on multi-source point-level sensor fusion. Measurements from a 360° light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor and two depth cameras are early-fused into one base-frame point set. Voxelization resamples it to a fixed number of tokens encoded by linear self-attention and proprioception-queried cross-attention, decoupling forward cost from sensor count. The point set retains standing thin barriers; a single-modality failure removes only part of the tokens, so the policy degrades gracefully. A single training run with terrain-aware rewards, perception-degradation injection, and domain randomization produces one policy for all eight terrain types, deployed on an onboard RK3588 without fine-tuning. On a DR02 humanoid, 20 trials at each of nine real-world settings over seven terrain types validate the policy on 70-cm-high platforms, 100-cm gaps, thin barriers, and sparse or narrow footholds; it also generalizes zero-shot outdoors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23666
Constraint-following music generation asks a score to satisfy several user-specified properties at once, each checkable programmatically (key, meter, length, range, final note, rhythm, motion and form), yet no existing benchmark isolates this capability. We construct MusicConstraintBench, 2,180 items over eight constraint families, on which current models fail once a few constraints are combined. The natural remedy is reinforcement learning with these verifiers as reward, yet we observe that a reward paid only when every property holds leaves most training groups without a learning signal: over the first 50 updates, 0.550 of rollout groups score identically and receive no gradient, even though a failing score typically misses only one requested property. Under the joint criterion, rollouts for a prompt tend to fail together, so a binary reward cannot separate a nearly correct score from a malformed one. We therefore introduce MusicRLVR, which pays graded per-property credit behind a hard validation gate that rejects malformed outputs, plus a joint-satisfaction bonus, requiring no human annotation, learned reward model, or music-domain fine-tuning. On MusicConstraintBench, MusicRLVR lifts Qwen3-4B-Instruct from 0.160 to 0.807 on mixed constraints and leads every zero-shot baseline including Llama-3.1-70B at 0.380. It also generalises to property combinations unseen in training and to out-of-range parameter values, showing that verifiable rewards need not presuppose a target output.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23665
Maintenance work orders must often be processed offline on embedded hardware, yet downstream software requires predictable structured output. We present ARID (Aviation-inspired Routing for Industrial Deployment), which extracts component, failure mode, symptom, and maintenance action into fixed-schema JSON on an 8 GB NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX. ARID combines conservative dual-teacher filtering, targeted noise-aware synthesis, one routing decision per work order, 4-bit inference, and grammar-constrained decoding. From 2,326 unlabeled OMIn records, it retains 716 training pairs and adds 99 topology-constrained records targeting action extraction. On 300 human-labeled records, ARID reaches 84.8% token-F1 on the reference stack and 82.9% on the deployed Jetson. Resident serving achieves 5,310/5,656 ms P50/P99 at 12.5 W. On zero-shot MaintNet transfer, semantic F1 falls to 46.4% while parser success remains at least 99.8%, showing that output validity transfers but field semantics do not.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23582
6D object pose estimation is fundamental to robotic manipulation and automation. Recent zero-shot methods have significantly improved generalization to unseen objects, but most still rely on large-scale pretrained models with substantial GPU computation and memory demands. These requirements complicate deployment on robotic platforms where perception, planning, and control share limited computational resources, while learned intermediate representations offer limited geometric interpretability for task-specific adaptation. To address these limitations, we propose G6D, a learning-free, geometry-driven RGB-D 6D pose solver. Given an RGB-D observation, an object instance mask, camera intrinsics, and a CAD model, G6D generates pose hypotheses through template-based geometric matching and refines them using silhouette and depth consistency, forming a purely geometry-driven pose estimation paradigm. This paradigm requires neither pretrained visual models nor target-specific training and preserves interpretable geometric representations throughout pose estimation. Moreover, adjustable hypothesis counts provide flexible accuracy-computation trade-offs, while a CPU-only configuration supports deployment without GPU resources. Experiments on LineMOD and five BOP19 datasets demonstrate advanced performance. Real-world pick-and-place experiments further demonstrate G6D's applicability to robotic manipulation. The complete project is publicly available at this https URL .
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23566
We present Elevator-VIGS, a visual-inertial 3D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system that keeps tracking and mapping through elevator rides. Inside a moving elevator, the two sensors are in conflict. The camera sees only the robot's motion relative to the elevator, while the IMU senses that motion plus the elevator's motion relative to the world. This conflict is challenging for existing visual-inertial estimators. If vision dominates, the estimator tracks only the robot's motion within the elevator and misses the elevator's rise, and if the conflict remains, the estimator diverges. We observe that the conflict comes from forcing both observations into a single coordinate frame. We instead estimate the robot's pose in the elevator's coordinate frame, and the elevator's motion relative to the world as a per-keyframe transport state, the elevator's rise and vertical velocity, within dense visual-inertial bundle adjustment. Elevator-VIGS detects rides zero-shot with a vision-language model and a depth network, and constrains the transport state at the departure and the arrival. We record real-world and simulated elevator sequences. On these sequences, Elevator-VIGS achieves state-of-the-art tracking and rendering performance. On four elevator-free public benchmarks it keeps the state-of-the-art performance of VIGS-SLAM. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23491
Non-prehensile manipulation is practical for relocating large, heavy, or geometrically ungraspable objects. Yet, long-horizon pushing of arbitrarily-shaped 3D objects couples three problems: 1) where to push the object so as to approach the target pose, 2) whether each push is stable and reachable, 3) whether subsequent actions remain feasible. We present an object-centric pushing policy within a feedback-guided hierarchical framework. At the low level, a learning-based policy predicts contact actions from a pose- and scale-normalized point cloud, conditioned on a near single-step subgoal. A stability score is applied to evaluate the predicted contacts by a quasi-static sliding-versus-tipping analysis. At the high level, BIT$^*$ first searches for an object path, and the next several subgoals are checked by contact prediction and robot motion planning for future feasibility. Failed motion plans, as feedback, change the local path costs and trigger re-planning. During execution, only the first feasible action is executed. In simulation, we evaluate 22 objects in six different scenes, upon which we also conduct comprehensive ablation studies. Results demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines with a clear margin and can reliably achieve long-horizon object pushing tasks under different situations. We also report quantitative real-robot experiments with a Franka arm and qualitative demonstrations with a mobile manipulator for large and heavy objects, with directly zero-shot sim-to-real transfer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23439
Large language models are increasingly used in oncology applications, but their predictions are often weakly grounded in explicit medical structure. We present TRACE, a deployable tree-relational enhancement framework for oncology LLMs. TRACE separates expensive offline structure learning from lightweight online inference: oncology concepts and relations are organized into an updatable tree-relational structure, refined using LM-loss-derived evidence, and retrieved at inference time as compact prompt evidence. This design supports task-adaptive evidence selection without requiring supervised labels in the zero-shot setting. Across ten oncology classification tasks and one MedQuAD CancerGov QA benchmark, TRACE improves both label-free evaluation and supervised fine-tuning. Additional analyses show that TRACE improves over vanilla RAG and generic GraphRAG, remains useful under leakage-controlled METABRIC inputs, and produces interpretable evidence paths aligned with clinical reasoning. These results suggest that explicit, updatable medical structure is a practical path toward more accurate and auditable oncology LLM deployment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35810
Long-context language models interface with external knowledge through raw natural language. In retrieval-augmented systems, this creates a persistent index-payload schism: dense vectors enable searchable routing, but models must re-ingest lengthy text payloads for reasoning at O(N^2) attention cost. Existing compression methods further produce private states tied to specific architectures. We introduce Machine-Interpretable Information (MII), the first agent-to-agent (A2A) document-to-state protocol. A dual-timescale state-space Writer compiles documents into a canonical, fixed-bandwidth state (56 tokens), and a lightweight Translator maps it into any frozen Reader's embedding space, reducing query-time cost to O(K). The resulting .mii artifact unifies Retrieval (searchable geometry), Reasoning (global memory), and Reconstruction (grounded details) in a single transferable medium. We demonstrate strong cross-model interoperability across heterogeneous LLMs (e.g., Llama, Qwen, Mistral) -- despite the Writer using a legacy GPT-2 vocabulary, forcing genuine semantic translation rather than token-level memorization. Mechanistic probes reveal modular latent structure: entity representations can be causally traced and zero-shot transplanted between unrelated document states while remaining decodable. To address lexical reconstruction under fixed bandwidth, we propose Residual-MII, a cache hierarchy combining compiled global memory with sparse local evidence. On HotpotQA (7,405 queries), Residual-MII exceeds full-context Exact Match at approximately 7% of the attention FLOPs, suggesting a paradigm shift toward compiled, transferable neural document formats.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23371
FORM is a domain-specific symbolic manipulation language widely used in particle physics for processing the very large algebraic expressions arising from multi-loop Feynman diagram calculations. Despite its central role in precision theoretical physics, no artificial-intelligence tooling exists, to our knowledge, for assisting physicists in writing FORM code. We show that contemporary large language models (LLMs), including frontier models with hundreds of billions of parameters, achieve a zero-percent execution pass rate on our instruction-following and tutorial-style FORM tasks without documentation in a single attempt, establishing FORM as a genuine zero-shot language for LLMs at the time of writing. We then present a verification-driven data generation pipeline that uses the FORM binary itself as an execution oracle to produce and validate a corpus of 4,633 training examples spanning deterministic computations, open-ended programs, tutorial code, and knowledge question-answer pairs. Fine-tuning a compact open-weights model (Qwen3-8B) with quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) yields a specialist that, evaluated on four complementary benchmarks (840 tasks, single attempt each), decisively outperforms frontier models with up to 756B parameters in execution rate and in strict, FORM-verified output matching on the larger benchmarks, and remains statistically indistinguishable from them on the smaller, harder ones. General reasoning and coding capabilities are preserved within 2.6 percentage points.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23367
Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting now reconstructs renderable scenes from unposed, uncalibrated images. Yet, most models supervise only photometric consistency and predict Gaussians pixel by pixel, which leaves global structure fragile and ties primitive count to image resolution and view count. To this end, GrapeSplat amalgamates multi-view cues into a voxel-aligned scene representation and decodes Gaussians directly from the learned grid, requiring no per-scene optimization or post-processing. An Atlas Encoder lifts all views into pixel-wise geometry-and-appearance features anchored at predicted 3D points. PEACH-Vox compands the unbounded scene into a bounded sparse grid through a smooth per-axis map with an exact closed-form inverse. The Sparse Decoder then consolidates the grid with sparse convolutions and decodes the full scene as multiple Gaussians per occupied cell. This amalgamated representation exploits sparse voxel occupancy, where the Gaussian count follows the occupied cells and saturates as views cover the scene, while grid resolution sets its ceiling. GrapeSplat turns unposed images into a renderable Gaussian scene in a single forward pass. Trained with 2D and 3D supervision on 8-view sequences, it generalizes zero-shot from 4 to 64 views across indoor and unbounded scenes. Code and trained weights are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23182
3D scene graphs provide semantically rich and hierarchical representations for robot perception. However, existing systems do not maintain uncertainty as an explicit belief or propagate it through the operations that construct and refine the graph. We introduce Probabilistic Scene Graph (PSG), a generalization of the conventional scene graph that represents a posterior over possible graphs, factorized into a discrete graph structure of entities, relations, and semantic attributes, and continuous states that ground them spatially, with uncertainty maintained over both components. Geometry is carried directly by the nodes rather than selected from a separately constructed metric map, so a metric map, where needed, follows from the graph rather than preceding it. We instantiate PSG's probabilistic spatial grounding with hierarchical graphs of Gaussians (HGG): each object primitive is represented by a full-covariance Gaussian under a Normal-Inverse-Wishart belief, and the same parametrization applied recursively within a node yields a geometry graph that resolves its surface at finer resolution. We then build a mapping pipeline that preserves these beliefs throughout graph construction and refinement: a purely graph-based coarse-to-fine alignment registers observations by comparing node beliefs, while a nested Expectation-Maximization and factor-graph optimization jointly refines poses, object parameters, and internal geometry. Across six datasets spanning indoor RGB-D, outdoor LiDAR, and cross-modality deployment, HGG operates at sensor rate with near-constant memory and achieves state-of-the-art object accuracy and zero-shot graph alignment.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23144
Generative vision-language models (VLMs) offer a counting paradigm in which one model produces both a count and a natural-language account of the scene, yet their raw counting accuracy sits in the range of sub-million-parameter specialist regressors. The open question is whether auxiliary guidance from a pretrained specialist can lift them into useful territory, and through which channel that guidance is best routed. We evaluate Qwen2.5-VL-7B on four widely used crowd counting benchmarks (ShanghaiTech A and B, UCF-QNRF, NWPU-Crowd). Zero-shot prompting rarely produces a parseable count, so LoRA supervised fine-tuning establishes the baseline at overall MAE 81.64. Conditioning on a P2PNet-derived density heatmap as an auxiliary visual signal fails in every encoding we tested, and an adversarial-swap protocol shows the model reads the heatmap but applies it counterproductively. We propose CrowdCue, a family that supplies the same specialist's already-integrated integer count to the VLM as a discrete symbol. The text-channel variant reaches MAE 72.04. The visual-channel variant, which renders the integer as printed digits and supplies it as a second image, reaches MAE 62.65, the strongest result in this paper and well ahead of the cue-supplying specialist alone (84.45 on the same split). In the late-fusion VLM we study, the binding constraint is not the channel but the abstraction level at which the specialist signal is delivered.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.23012