Recognition
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A Fully Automatic Pipeline for 3D Dendrite Instance Segmentation in SBF-SEM
2026-10-02 14:04:26Zewen Zhuo, Ilya Belevich, Eija Jokitalo, Alejandra Sierra, Jussi TohkaAbstract
Accurate three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of individual dendrites in serial block-face scanning electron microscopy (SBF-SEM) is essential for quantifying structural plasticity in the brain, yet manual annotation at scale is infeasible. We present a fully automatic pipeline for 3D dendrite instance segmentation that unifies YOLOv6-guided Segment Anything Model (SAM) prompting on downsampled slices, iterative two-dimensional mask refinement, random forest 3D instance linking, and instance-aware high-resolution refinement using nnU-Net at native resolution into a single system requiring no manual prompting at inference. Applied to hippocampal CA1 SBF-SEM datasets from a control rat and a pilocarpine- induced epileptic rat, our pipeline reconstructs coherent, well- separated dendrites with high semantic accuracy (Dice 0.93 and 0.91) and strong instance-level performance on control tissue, while analysis of the more challenging epileptic tissue identifies instance recognition in dense regions as the principal remaining limitation. The high-resolution refinement stage recovers thin dendritic protrusions, providing a basis for downstream spine- level analysis. Code is available at this https URL ZE-WEN/dendrite-3d-instance-seg.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03332
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An automated pipeline for standardised speech-unit annotation in spontaneous dialogue
2026-10-02 10:00:14Hanlu He, Harald Vilhelm Skat-R{\o}rdam, Ingvi \"Orn\'olfsson, Ivana KonvalinkaAbstract
Quantifying conversational dynamics requires reliable identification of interactional units and their temporal boundaries, but speech activity alone does not distinguish conversational turns from listener feedback or within-turn pauses. We present an automated pipeline for extracting turns and backchannels from separate-channel recordings of spontaneous dyadic conversation, designed to provide a consistent first-pass annotation for subsequent human review. The pipeline combines voice activity detection, channel-energy filtering, temporal merging, automatic speech recognition, and context-based post-processing. We evaluated the pipeline on 99 ten-minute Danish conversations from 33 dyads using segment-level detection reliability and temporal boundary error. Conversations were recorded under both normal and asymmetric listening conditions. In the latter, speech-shaped noise was delivered to one participant through bone-conduction headphones. Overall detection reliability was F1=0.621, with similar performance for turns F1=0.624 and backchannels F1=0.618. For successfully matched segments, median absolute onset and offset errors were 0.150 and 0.160s for turns and 0.130 and 0.180s for backchannels, respectively. Mean errors were substantially larger for turn boundaries, indicating a smaller number of large boundary mismatches. Performance did not differ significantly across the two experimental listening conditions. In a four-conversation case study, pipeline-human agreement was lower and more variable than human inter-annotator agreement and varied across parameter settings. These results support the pipeline as an automated first pass within a semi-automated annotation workflow, providing a consistent basis for more standardised and reproducible annotation of conversational dynamics.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03078
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Personalized Automatic Speech Recognition for a Dysarthric and Tracheostomic Speaker using Artificial Conversations
2026-10-02 08:52:00David Nadrchal, Monorama Swain, Florian Schmid, Gerhard Widmer, Paul PrimusAbstract
This work presents an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system personalized for a Czech speaker with a permanent tracheal stoma and severe dysarthria rendering their speech unintelligible to untrained listeners. We release a public dataset containing 33 annotated hours of the speaker's speech, collected using a novel "artificial conversation" protocol designed for high engagement and dialogue realism. We propose a multi-stage training pipeline based on Whisper Base: fine-tuning on standard Czech speech, acoustically simulated tracheostomic speech, and the speaker's data. We evaluate the system across three near real-time scenarios: scripted conversations, question answering, and spontaneous dialogue, achieving a 50\% relative reduction in Character Error Rate compared to Whisper Base baseline and surpassing the average recognition accuracy of their assistants in acoustic recognition of isolated utterances. We demonstrate that even for severely impeded speech, a helpful ASR is achievable, as evidenced by the quantitative results and the feedback from the speaker.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03017
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From Expression to Reaction: Role-aware Visual Transfer and Stimulus-guided Reasoning for Interlocutor Emotion Recognition
2026-10-02 08:50:26Wei Wang, Zhaowu Li, Jianjie Luo, Fu Lee Wang, Lap-Kei Lee, Zhenguo YangAbstract
In this paper, we propose a Role-aware Stimulus-guided (RASG) framework for interlocutor emotion recognition, which predicts listener emotions from listener-only videos and speaker-only audios. RASG consists of Role-aware Visual Transfer (RVT) and Stimulus-guided Boundary Reasoning (SBR) modules, which address supervision mismatch due to the lack of labeled listener data and ambiguity among visually similar listener reactions whose interpretation depends on speaker context, respectively. More specifically, RVT selects speaker samples whose facial expressions support their emotion labels. It then filters listener tracks and uses reliable pseudo-labels to train a listener-centric visual expert. SBR uses a two-class language reasoner only when the visual model is uncertain. It treats speaker audio and text as context rather than direct emotion evidence to distinguish similar listener reactions. Experiments conducted on MER-Cross dataset shows that RASG achieves 76.25\% on MER-Cross and improves the performance of the baseline over 17\%. Our team ranks second in Track 1 (MER-Cross) of the MER Grand Challenge at ACM MM 2026.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03016
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A Guideline-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Schema-as-Code Biomedical Named Entity Recognition
2026-10-02 08:06:20Songtao Li, Yijia Zhang, Shidi Zhang, Jianyuan Yuan, Fengyu Zhang, Hongfei LinAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising potential for biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER) through instruction following and in-context learning. However, existing LLM-based BioNER methods still face two key limitations. First, retrieved demonstrations and external biomedical knowledge provide limited support for dataset-specific annotation semantics, leaving entity boundaries, type scopes, and annotation conventions ambiguous. Second, free-form generation lacks sufficient structural control, often leading to invalid formats, hallucinated mentions, duplicated entities, and boundary errors. To address these limitations, we propose GAMA, a guideline-augmented multi-agent framework for schema-as-code BioNER. GAMA first induces candidate annotation rules from labeled training instances and verifies them against annotated data to construct reliable dataset-specific guideline memory. Guided by these verified rules, a planning component generates ranked span-type hypotheses with rationales, and a coding component converts them into schema-constrained entity objects. A verification module then checks span grounding, type validity, and structural compliance, and performs dual-loop refinement to correct invalid or low-confidence predictions. Experiments on five widely used BioNER datasets with multiple LLM backbones show that GAMA consistently outperforms strong LLM-based baselines. Ablation and parameter analyses further verify the effectiveness of the proposed components.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02970
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Enhancing Biomedical Named Entity Recognition via Multiple Programming Languages Instruction Tuning and Ensemble Method
2026-10-02 07:42:44Songtao Li, Yijia Zhang, Jianyuan Yuan, Shidi Zhang, Fengyu Zhang, Hongfei LinAbstract
Instruction tuning has become a common paradigm for applying large language models (LLMs) to biomedical named entity recognition (BioNER). However, existing instruction-tuning approaches still face two key challenges. First, conventional natural-language instructions typically serialize BioNER annotations as flat textual outputs, providing limited structural constraints for typed entity extraction. Second, high-quality biomedical annotations are limited, and learning from a single serialized output form may restrict structural diversity and reduce model robustness. Although external biomedical knowledge can be introduced to alleviate data scarcity, it often requires costly resource construction. To address these challenges, we propose MITE, a Multiple Programming Languages Instruction Tuning and Ensemble method for BioNER. MITE reformulates BioNER as a structure-to-structure generation task by representing both instructions and entity outputs in code-formatted representations. Specifically, each training instance is transformed into multiple programming-language formats, including Python, C++, and Java, while preserving the same underlying entity semantics. These language-specific representations provide structurally diverse supervision without requiring external biomedical knowledge or additional annotations. During inference, MITE aggregates predictions from different code formats through an entity-level voting strategy, reducing language-specific prediction variance and improving robustness. Experiments on six widely used BioNER datasets demonstrate that MITE consistently outperforms representative BERT-based and LLM-based baselines and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization. Ablation and parameter analyses further verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed components.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02949
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FASTDIAR: Frame-level speaker encoder for Streaming Diarization
2026-10-02 07:32:11Nikita Torgashov, Okan K\"op\"ukl\"uAbstract
Real-time conversational agents require speaker diarization that streams and runs on a CPU. Most systems apply an utterance-level speaker encoder to short, heavily overlapping chunks, which wastes computation and leaves the model optimized for the wrong task. We instead turn a state-of-the-art speaker recognition architecture into a causal frame-level encoder that reads the stream once and emits one embedding every 80~ms from a bounded two-second window of past audio, and pair it with online clustering that gates every update on the self-similarity of the stream. Trained only by distillation from an utterance-level teacher on simulated and out-of-domain mixtures, and evaluated with one fixed set of hyperparameters, the system is the most accurate streaming diarizer on low-overlap benchmarks at sub-second latency, degrades far less than cache-based systems as the number of speakers grows, and runs five times faster than real time on a single CPU thread.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02941
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Learning Jazz Pianist Style with Cross-Attention Conditioning
2026-10-02 07:05:22Drew Edwards, Akira Maezawa, Simon DixonAbstract
Jazz pianists develop distinctive traits that experienced listeners can often identify within seconds, yet the features underlying this recognition resist formal description. We study jazz pianist style through the lens of a pretrained symbolic music transformer, showing that its learned representations already encode pianist identity well enough for highly accurate classification across two benchmarks. We then augment the transformer with cross-attention over learned pianist identity embeddings, enabling it to generate music conditioned on a specific artist's style. Two evaluation protocols confirm that the generator captures meaningful stylistic structure: a sliding-window classifier consistently attributes conditioned continuations to the correct artist, far above unconditioned baselines; and a classifier trained entirely on synthetic generations identifies real pianists across 12 classes with 87% chunk-level and 95% song-level accuracy. Finally, we repurpose the classifier to locate the most characteristic moments within a performance, surfacing the specific musical gestures that distinguish each pianist's voice.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02918
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ViTok: Improving Dense Semantics in AM-RADIO-Style Multi-Teacher Distillation with PHI-S and Masked Image Modelling
2026-10-02 06:54:02Hailun Xu, Kanchan SarkarAbstract
We study how to consolidate the current VITOK progress into a single multi-teacher distillation recipe that jointly preserves global recognition and dense semantics. Our starting point is an AM-RADIO-style student distilled from SigLIP2 and DINOv3-L, where SigLIP2 supplies strong global semantics and DINOv3-L supplies stronger dense features. The central empirical issue is that the same recipe does not optimize all objectives equally well: changes that improve ImageNet-1K kNN accuracy can still degrade ADE20K segmentation. We summarize a progression of modifications that make this trade-off more explicit and more manageable: split adaptor heads for CLS and patch tokens, asymmetric cosine/MSE losses, initialization from a DINOv3-L checkpoint, teacher reweighting, masked image modeling (MIM), and PHI-S feature balancing. The resulting model reaches 83.2 patch kNN and 85.2 CLS kNN, slightly surpassing the DINOv3-L teacher on ImageNet-1K kNN classification, while PHI-S restores ADE20K performance from 46.5/58.1 to 48.5/61.0 mIoU/mAcc, matching the teacher on this dense benchmark. We also summarize negative results: scaling distillation from ImageNet-1K to ImageNet22K does not consistently help, and naively adding extra teachers such as SAM3 or HOG features introduces interference. Rather than claiming a final recipe, this paper distills the current project state into a compact empirical story and a concrete set of lessons for future iterations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02903
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AgentTrap: Stateful Feedback Deception against Autonomous Penetration Testing Agents
2026-10-02 06:07:37Yuelin Wang, Jiongchi Yu, Yanbang SunAbstract
Autonomous penetration testing agents conduct multi-step attacks by continuously adapting their plans and actions to target responses. As a common defense, honeypots can be deployed to divert these agents from real assets by presenting decoy services, while also supporting attack tracing and active counterattacks. However, conventional honeypots rely primarily on static artifacts and predefined responses, leaving them unable to adapt to the evolving attack strategies of autonomous penetration testing agents. To this end, we present AgentTrap, the first closed-loop honeypot tailored for autonomous penetration testing agents. AgentTrap uses sentinel endpoints to avoid benign interference, stateful deception grounded in the protected application, and behavior-guided escalation to sustain engagement and collect agent-side behavioral evidence with controlled disclosures. We evaluate AgentTrap against eight autonomous penetration-testing agents in a deployed web application containing a real application endpoint and a separate honeypot endpoint configured under three defense strategies. Compared with no defense, AgentTrap reduces the aggregate real-target attack success rate from 95.8% to 79.2% and successfully elicits attacker API keys in 18.8% of the runs, outperforming static deception and fixed escalation. Furthermore, trace analysis shows that resistance to such counterattacks depends jointly on model-level recognition of deceptive requests and architecture-level isolation of sensitive resources.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02869
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One Photon, Many Worlds: Posteriors and Predictions with Single-Photon Cameras
2026-10-02 01:58:03Haejoon Lee (Carnegie Mellon University), Mohit Gupta (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Vijayakumar Bhagavatula (Carnegie Mellon University), Aswin C. Sankaranarayanan (Carnegie Mellon University)Abstract
Single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) cameras operate fundamentally differently from conventional cameras due to their photon-counting nature. Each frame produces a binary image: pixels report zero if no photons arrived during exposure, and one if one or more photons arrived. Reconstructing a scene or inferring its properties from a single binary frame is difficult because many different images could produce the same measurement; thus, the inverse problem is fundamentally one-to-many. As we gather more binary measurements, the inherent uncertainty associated with the inverse problem and any associated inference diminishes. With sufficient photon counts, photon noise becomes negligible relative to the signal mean, enabling near-deterministic scene recovery and inference. This work characterizes the transition from stochastic to near-deterministic scene understanding as photon budget increases, analyzing how the stochasticity in photon arrival affects downstream inference tasks. Technically, we develop a conditional generative framework based on a Hypergeometric frame-thinning process for accumulated binary SPAD measurements. Generative models capture the one-to-many nature of photon-starved inverse problems, enabling empirical characterization of how this ambiguity diminishes with increasing measurements and its impact on downstream tasks like character recognition, QR code decoding, and facial analysis.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02675
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Counterexample Generation via Per-Theorem Symbolic Verifiers: When Imitation Hurts and Reinforcement Repairs
2026-10-01 20:13:14Omar Farouk Zouak, Houssam Eddine Boukhalfa, Soumaya Lakehal, Shiv Katiyar, Samia Nefti-MezianiAbstract
Large language models often solve a theorem forward yet fail to disprove a closely related false one: a falsification gap that supervised fine-tuning does not close and can actively worsen. We frame counterexample generation as constrained witness emission against a deterministic per-theorem Python verifier, and release SymCE, a corpus of 4,707 false undergraduate-algebra and real-analysis conjectures, each paired with executable verifiers. The verifier also serves as the reward function, making SymCE a training environment. Training Qwen3-4B with SFT followed by GRPO under this oracle reveals an imitation trap: counterexample-only SFT collapses true-theorem recognition from 0.27 to 0.00, while RLVR with a sparse outcome-only reward repairs this and exceeds the base, to 0.66. The collapse replicates across four seeds and on Gemma-3-4B. Sparse and dense rewards yield statistically indistinguishable in-domain success yet diverge by 33 points on a held-out calibration probe, a dissociation we trace to the partial-credit term. Our 4B model outperforms every evaluated 7B open-weights math specialist, remains competitive with six frontier commercial APIs, and transfers under unchanged prompting to GSM8K, MATH-500 and MMLU-college-math. A human audit of 177 verifier decisions finds 97.7% accuracy. Code, data, verifier modules and annotations: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02444
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SocialVLA: A Social Perception Gateway for Human-Reaction-Based Failure Detection and Recovery in VLA Manipulation
2026-10-01 18:36:35Sofya Konstantinova, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Artem Lykov, Dzmitry TsetserukouAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies enable diverse robotic manipulation but can fail during execution without recognizing their own errors. Human observers provide complementary signals, as unexpected robot behavior can trigger rapid vocal, facial, or verbal reactions before failure is completed. We introduce SocialVLA, a local, policy-agnostic social perception gateway that converts spontaneous human reactions into runtime intervention signals for VLA manipulation. SocialVLA combines causal paralinguistic audio detection, visual reaction recognition, explicit stop phrases, and robot-relevance estimation. An asynchronous first-event fusion mechanism triggers a VLA hold from the earliest sufficiently confident signal, while a separate speech channel captures verbal corrections for participant-directed continuation, restart, or instruction revision. We evaluate SocialVLA on physical Unitree G1 manipulation using 15 participants, with 238 annotated intervention-worthy episodes and 1.038 h of non-intervention behavior. Frozen offline replay achieves 54.6% recall and 69.5% precision, while unfiltered audio-video fusion reaches 64.3% recall. Relevance estimation reduces false-stop episodes from 100 to 57 and increases precision from 60.5% to 69.8%. In prospective deployment on an unseen 16th participant, the frozen system achieves 59.5% recall and 91.7% precision. Median detector-to-fusion latency is 47.9 ms, VLA-gate-to-physical-hold latency is 336 ms, and reaction-onset-to-hold latency is 1.021 s. These results demonstrate a complete local pathway from spontaneous social reaction to physical VLA interruption and participant-directed recovery.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02360
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PyPottery: an AI-powered end-to-end suite for pottery processing and publication
Abstract
The study of ceramic materials constitutes a cornerstone of archaeological research, yet the post-production workflow for pottery documentation remains labor-intensive and creates significant publication bottlenecks. This paper presents PyPottery, an open-source, AI-powered suite designed to semi-automate the complete ceramic documentation pipeline. The suite comprises four integrated modules: PyPotteryScan for automated image extraction and handwriting recognition; PyPotteryInk for automatic inking of pencil drawings; PyPotteryTrace for semantically-aware vectorization; and PyPotteryLayout for automated layout generation. Evaluated on 50 hand-drawn sheets containing 240 pottery drawings from the Terramara di Montale (Italy), the framework achieved substantial time savings confirmed by usability study participants, who reported a median perceived speedup of 40$\times$ over traditional workflows (range: 17.5$\times$--120$\times$). These results highlight the potential of AI-assisted tools in archaeological documentation, while the paper addresses the strategic redistribution of cognitive labor toward augmentation rather than automation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02072
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Diffusion-Based Synthetic Data Pretraining for Enhancing Activity Recognition
2026-10-01 16:43:40E. Riveros (Institute of Computing, State University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil), D. Vega-Oliveros (Institute of Science and Technology, Federal University of Sao Paulo, Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil), A. Soriano-Vargas (Universidad de Ingenieria y Tecnologia, Lima, Peru), A. Rocha (Institute of Computing, State University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil)Abstract
Human activity recognition (HAR) is increasingly important for healthcare, well-being, and daily monitoring ap- plications, for which detecting alimentary activities such as eating and drinking can provide actionable insight into dietary habits and chronic disease management. HAR systems, however, often underperform on subtle and underrepresented classes, limiting their utility in real-world dietary monitoring. This work builds upon CABiGRU, a convolutional architecture with Bidirectional GRU layers, multi-head attention, and residual connections, designed to capture discriminative temporal patterns from smart- watch accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer data. To improve CaBiGRU's generalization and reduce underfitting in the minority class, we leverage synthetic sensor data windows using a diffusion model and adopt a two-stage training strategy: pre-training CABiGRU on synthetic data, followed by fine-tuning on the real-world data. On the DEO (drinking/eating/other) dataset, the proposed pipeline achieves a balanced accuracy of 90.6%, improving over a strong supervised baseline and showing the benefits of diffusion-based synthetic pre-training for recognizing alimentary activities and representing a step forward dealing with unbalanced classes. These results suggest that combining diffusion-generated data with targeted fine-tuning enhances robust recognition of dietary behaviors, supporting more reliable deployment in healthcare and nutrition-monitoring settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02292
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Weather-Aware Domain Adaptation for Street-View Weather Recognition
2026-10-01 16:31:43Hossein Maghsoumi, George Atia, Yaser P. FallahAbstract
Adverse conditions such as rain, snow, fog, and dust remain challenging for camera-based perception in autonomous driving. We study multi-class weather recognition from street-view images under domain shift, where most available training data come from non-street-view sources that differ markedly from real driving scenes. We propose Weather-Aware Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation (WA-ADDA), which conditions the domain discriminator on predicted weather to promote features that are both domain-invariant and weather-sensitive. We also assemble a multi-dataset benchmark by unifying diverse non-street-view weather collections as sources and real street-view images as targets, and define a standardized evaluation protocol with macro accuracy as the primary metric. Across backbones (ResNet-50, EfficientNet, VGG, DenseNet), WA-ADDA consistently improves street-view performance and yields strong per-class recalls in challenging conditions while preserving clear-weather accuracy. These findings highlight the feasibility of domain-adapted weather recognition and the value of our benchmark for advancing robust, on-board perception.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02000
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Anti-Persona: Disrupting Unauthorized Identity Binding and Recognition in Personalized Vision--Language Models
2026-10-01 16:10:33Abhishek Basu, Fahad Shamshad, Karthik NandakumarAbstract
Few-shot personalization enables large vision--language models (LVLMs) to learn user-specific visual concepts for applications such as personalized retrieval and subject-aware querying. However, it also creates a privacy risk: an adversary can bind a target identity from a few reference images and subsequently detect that identity in new images through natural-language queries. We introduce Anti-Persona, an image-level defense against unauthorized identity binding and recognition in personalized LVLMs. Our key insight is that identity personalization relies on visual features shared across multiple reference images. We aggregate these features into an identity prototype and optimize visually subtle perturbations that disrupt prototype alignment in the vision-encoder space. Spatial smoothing and low-frequency preservation further promote visual fidelity and practical resilience to image compression. The resulting protection does not depend on a specific prompt and supports both proactive anti-personalization and reactive image protection. Experiments on two representative personalized LVLMs demonstrate protection rates of up to $95.0\%$ while preserving visual fidelity. The method remains stable across prompt variations and evaluated identity-query tasks, and improves black-box transfer under encoder mismatch.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01944
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TouchTherm: Building Multimodal Digital Twins of Objects for Tactile and Thermal Rendering
2026-10-01 16:10:08Yitao Zhang (ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China), Hong Ying (ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China), Haoran Guo (ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China), Xiaoying Zhou (ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China), Guanyu Chen (ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China), Chenxi Xiao (ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China)Abstract
Robotic simulation and virtual reality increasingly require object assets that capture not only visual geometry but also the physical cues underlying tactile and thermal interaction. Existing 3D datasets and reconstruction methods primarily represent object-scale geometry and visual appearance, overlooking microscale surface structure for high-fidelity haptic rendering and transient temperature dynamics for temperature-aware interaction. We present TouchTherm, a framework for constructing simulation-ready visuo-tactile-thermal object assets from real-world objects. For visual and tactile reconstruction, we combine structured-light scanning with multiview normal maps obtained from photometric stereo. The normal maps are registered to the scanned geometry and transformed into tangent space to recover local micro-height fields for optical tactile rendering, while the coarse mesh handles collision detection. For thermal reconstruction, we capture synchronized multiview infrared videos of natural cooling following controlled heating and reconstruct a physics-regularized dynamic thermal field. Experiments on 20 objects show that the reconstructed micro-height fields preserve dominant surface structures and recover higher-frequency details beyond the coarse geometry, while the thermal fields achieve held-out surface-temperature MAEs of 0.465 degrees C and 0.592 degrees C at 30 s and 45 s, respectively. The resulting tactile assets support synthetic-to-real object recognition from tactile observations, while a glove-based VR system demonstrates spatially and temporally varying thermal feedback. These results highlight the potential of TouchTherm for multimodal sensory simulation and temperature-aware virtual interaction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01943
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LAST: Looped Audio Spectrogram Transformer
2026-10-01 15:59:09Haider Al-Tahan, Sean O'Brien, Anastasia Razdaibiedina, N. Apurva Ratan MurtyAbstract
Increasing depth of transformer models improves recognition, but it comes at a substantial cost. Each additional layer requires more parameters, which makes the process computationally inefficient. We ask whether additional processing can focus on integrating features already computed. Looped Audio Spectrogram Transformer (LAST) first processes all tokens, then reuses the same blocks to refine only the class token over fixed audio features, thereby making later passes inexpensive. On AudioSet, ten-pass LAST achieves 0.345 mean average precision, exceeding a twelve-layer sequential transformer by 2.1% relative with 49.4% fewer parameters, 42% fewer multiply-accumulate operations, and 9.8% higher measured throughput. Across separately trained models, increasing the pass count from two to ten improves accuracy while adding only 1.2% computation. Further evaluations show improved robustness to temporal masking and various other auditory augmentations, with better generalization on classification tasks with music, environmental, and event sounds.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01926
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From Pixels to Policy: A Multi-Agent System for Intervention and Geo-Spatial Decision Support
2026-10-01 15:29:11Hosam Elgendy, Utkarsh MallAbstract
Urban environments are shaped by design choices with long-term implications for health, safety, and quality of life, yet evaluating proposed interventions remains costly, time-consuming, and often impractical. Existing geospatial vision methods largely focus on monitoring urban indicators from aerial and street-view imagery, rather than proposing interventions and estimating their effects on such indicators. Moving beyond recognition, we introduce the problem of discovering interventions that improve target indicators for a given aerial or street-view image. We argue that a black-box indicator model, combined with a generative editing model, can serve as an implicit digital twin for testing intervention hypotheses. We present VIDA-Geo , a multi-agent system that explores this intervention space by coordinating segmentation, diffusion-based inpainting, and indicator scoring models to produce interventions that are both perceptually realistic and aligned with real-world policies. We evaluate our system on 8 indicators across aerial and street-view imagery, measuring changes in factors such as perceived safety and greenery. Our approach outperforms existing baselines in many cases, achieving up to 2X higher perceptual quality and policy alignment scores. Finally, our model provides users with multiple candidate interventions, supporting an expert city-planner-in-the-loop workflow.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01870
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