AI News Today

arXiv:2601.22588v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as reference-free evaluators via prompting, but this "LLM-as-a-Judge" paradigm is costly, opaque, and sensitive to prompt design. In this work, we investigate whether smaller models can serve as efficient evaluators by leveraging internal representations instead of surface generation. We uncover a consistent empirical pattern: small LMs, despite with weak generative ability, encode rich evaluative si

arXiv:2602.23440v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning has emerged as an effective paradigm for training large language models to interleave reasoning with search engine calls. However, existing approaches face a fundamental credit assignment problem: methods like Search-R1 assign a single outcome reward to the entire multi-step trajectory, providing no signal about which reasoning or retrieval decisions were responsible for success or failure. Process-reward methods such as

arXiv:2604.07102v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation-based steering enables inference-time personalization of large language models, but its effects in educational applications are not well understood. We study activation-based persona vectors representing seven character traits in short-answer generation and automated scoring on the ASAP-SAS benchmark, across three language models spanning dense and mixture-of-experts architectures. Persona steering lowers answer quality overall, with

arXiv:2604.13356v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanisms for continued self-improvement of language models without external supervision remain an open challenge. We propose Peer-Predictive Self-Training (PST), a label-free fine-tuning framework in which multiple language models improve collaboratively by using a cross-model aggregate response as an internal training signal. Given a prompt, models generate responses sequentially; the final aggregated answer, which is often more reliable tha

arXiv:2607.08771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monocular depth estimation has seen remarkable progress through foundation models achieving robust zero-shot generalization, yet their computational demands place them far beyond the reach of embedded and mobile platforms. Lightweight alternatives exist, but have been developed almost exclusively within single-domain, self-supervised paradigms, failing silently under domain shift. We present ZipDepth, a compact monocular depth network that bridges

arXiv:2607.07719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning adapts a large language model to one task cheaply, but across a task sequence LoRA-style methods keep stacking low-rank updates on the same frozen weight, so each new task tends to overwrite the previous ones. We present ReCoLoRA (Recursive Consolidation of Low-Rank Adapters), a spectrum-aware framework for continual fine-tuning: adapters are initialized from a randomized SVD of the pretrained weight, per-layer eff

arXiv:2607.07885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic obstacle avoidance in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous mobile robots, particularly when large-scale robot-specific training data and simulation-based policies are impractical. We present a data-efficient, interpretable method for vision-based dynamic obstacle avoidance that operates entirely on real-world data, avoiding the sim-to-real transfer problem inherent in simulation-trained policies. O

arXiv:2607.07957v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects over 75 million individuals worldwide, yet scalable computational methods for remote behavioral screening remain limited. This study addresses two complementary challenges in automated detection of autism-related self-stimulatory behaviors from video: (1) identifying the optimal sequence-based neural network architecture and temporal sampling rate, and (2) characterizing data augmentation strategies for trai

arXiv:2607.08745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Vision-Language Models, Large Language Models, and Multimodal Large Language Models have improved autonomous driving tasks such as scene understanding, decision making, trajectory prediction, and visual question answering. However, evaluating whether these models can reliably reason about safety-critical incidents remains challenging. To address this gap, we present AUTOPILOT-VQA, an incident-centric visual question answering b

arXiv:2607.08092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Privacy-preserving clustering is critical for analyzing sensitive data in healthcare, cybersecurity, and enterprise applications, where maintaining data confidentiality must be balanced with analytical performance. This paper presents Equivariant Quantum Clustering (EQC), a parameter-efficient framework that integrates symmetry-aware quantum circuits with differential privacy to improve the privacy-utility tradeoff. EQC employs p4m equivariant pa

arXiv:2607.08233v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central challenge in building intelligent systems is enabling agents to jointly perceive complex inputs, form hypotheses about hidden patterns, and design informative experiments to test them. To study this problem, we propose ZendoWorld, a controlled interactive environment in which agents must infer a logical rule about visual game observations, acquire information by proposing new scenes, and refine their hypotheses based on feedback from th

arXiv:2607.08511v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Choosing a learning rate scheduling strategy is critical to neural network training, but manual selection is costly and rarely exhaustive. While classical AutoML approaches often treat the scheduler as a secondary hyperparameter, we systematically investigate its impact on classification accuracy across a diverse pool of architectures. We evaluated 30 representative architectures from convolutional and transformer families within the LEMUR neural

arXiv:2607.08639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advent of video-action models offers a promising path for robot control. Nevertheless, we argue that repurposing video generative models designed for digital content creation is inherently inadequate for physical environments. To bridge this gap, we present LingBot-VA 2.0, a video-action foundation model built from the ground up for embodiment. Four core design principles showcase its evolution from LingBot-VA. (1) Departing from traditional

arXiv:2607.08741v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generating realistic 3D human motions in real-time within interactive applications is key for animation, simulation, and humanoid robotics. While recent offline motion generation approaches offer precise control via text and kinematic constraints, they lack the inference speed required for interactive settings. Conversely, existing online methods enable real-time synthesis but often sacrifice controllability or struggle with complex text semantic

arXiv:2403.01560v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inspired by the impressive success of image-text foundation models, recent works have proposed to adapt these foundation models to video data, leading to efficient and effective video models for open-vocabulary action recognition. However, through a comprehensive evaluation, our work finds that state-of-the-art open-vocabulary action recognition models still struggle with generalization to video domains that they have not encountered. To addres

arXiv:2407.13632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deploying deep learning-based imaging tools across various clinical sites poses significant challenges due to inherent domain shifts and regulatory hurdles associated with site-specific fine-tuning. For histopathology, stain normalization techniques can mitigate discrepancies, but they often fall short of eliminating inter-site variations. Therefore, we present Data Alchemy, an explainable stain normalization method combined with test time data

arXiv:2411.15723v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-fidelity surface reconstruction from multi-view images is a core problem in 3D computer vision. While neural implicit surfaces like SDFs offer smooth geometry, they are often bottlenecked by the computational intensity of volume rendering. Conversely, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides rapid training but lacks geometry continuity, often leading to fragmented surfaces. This paper presents a novel framework that integrates Signed Distance

arXiv:2412.03259v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Event-based vision sensors offer high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and low power consumption, yet event-based vision models lag behind conventional frame-based vision methods. We argue that this gap is partly due to the lack of principled study of the transformation groups that govern event-based visual streams. Motivated by the role that geometric and group-theoretic methods have played in advancing computer vision, we present GERD

arXiv:2503.12999v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various multi-modal tasks. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in improving the personalization capabilities of VLMs. To better integrate user-provided concepts into VLMs, many methods use positive and negative samples to fine-tune these models. However, the scarcity of user-provided positive samples and the low quality of retrieved negative samples pose chal

arXiv:2504.18235v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Event-based cameras are bio-inspired sensors that detect light changes asynchronously for each pixel. They are increasingly used in fields like computer vision and robotics because of several advantages over traditional frame-based cameras, such as high temporal resolution, low latency, and high dynamic range. As with any camera, the output's quality depends on how well the camera's settings, called biases for event-based cameras, are configure

arXiv:2505.16456v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in 3D content generation have amplified demand for dynamic models that are both visually realistic and physically consistent. However, state-of-the-art video diffusion models frequently produce implausible results such as momentum violations and object interpenetrations. Existing physics-aware approaches often rely on task-specific fine-tuning or supervised data, which limits their scalability and applicability. To address the c

arXiv:2505.19422v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present \textbf{LlamaSeg}, a visual autoregressive framework that unifies multiple image segmentation tasks via natural language instructions. By reformulating segmentation as visual generation, LlamaSeg encodes masks as visual tokens and uses a LLaMA-style Transformer for direct next-token prediction, naturally fitting segmentation into autoregressive architectures. To support large-scale training, we introduce a data annotation pipeline an

arXiv:2511.12810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Camouflaged object detection is an emerging and challenging computer vision task that requires identifying and segmenting objects that blend seamlessly into their environments due to high similarity in color, texture, and size. This task is further complicated by low-light conditions, partial occlusion, small object size, intricate background patterns, and multiple objects. While many sophisticated methods have been proposed for this task, curr

arXiv:2511.16920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anomaly generation is often framed as few-shot fine-tuning with anomalous samples, which contradicts the scarcity that motivates generation and tends to overfit category priors. We tackle the setting where no real anomaly samples or training are available. We propose Delta-Denoising (\textbf{DeltaDeno}), a training-free zero-shot anomaly generation method that localizes and edits defects by contrasting two diffusion branches driven by a minimal

arXiv:2607.08243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The k-means++ algorithm is commonly restarted multiple times to avoid poor local optima, yet the number of restarts is almost always chosen arbitrarily and applied uniformly regardless of data set difficulty. This undermines any comparison relying on such a choice and wastes computation on easy data sets while potentially under-serving hard ones. We introduce GTRC, a restart criterion combining a Good-Turing estimate, a proven unconditional bound,

arXiv:2607.08254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantifying variability in a target population relative to a reference population is central to many scientific and clinical problems (e.g., diseased vs. healthy). Yet, without paired data and in the presence of heterogeneous target variation, existing methods struggle to separate multiple modes of target-specific variation. We propose \textit{CASL-VAE}, a deep contrastive latent variable model that learns structured latent generative factors from

arXiv:2607.08303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The problem of learning constant-depth circuits holds profound implications for computational learning theory. In a seminal result, by introducing the low-degree algorithm, Linial, Mansour, and Nisan (J. ACM 1993) presented a quasipolynomial-time learner for $\mathsf{AC}^0$ under the uniform distribution. However, obtaining comparable learning guarantees for broader classes of correlated distributions has remained a longstanding challenge. Recently

arXiv:2607.08312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How should language interface with a world model's discrete symbol system? The dominant paradigm -- end-to-end injection of LLM/VLM features into robot world models (RT-2, Octo, PaLM-E) -- implicitly assumes that language gradients can directly shape physical symbol representations. We ask whether this assumption is safe, find that it is not, and characterize the minimal architectural constraint that prevents the failure. Any language gradient ente

arXiv:2607.08331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding how artworks are created requires reasoning about the iterative decisions, material operations, and contextual influences that shape artistic production. While recent generative AI systems can synthesize artworks with high fidelity, they primarily model distributions over finished artifacts rather than the creative processes underlying their creation. In practice, artistic workflows are only partially documented through fragmented sou

arXiv:2607.08337v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion unlearning is essential for mitigating the generation of harmful or copyrighted content in text-to-image models. Current diffusion unlearning techniques determine the model update direction by either using alternatives of the target concept as an anchor or using empty prompts. The anchor-based method relies on manually and semantically-chosen anchors that risk biased unlearning, while the anchor-free method inherently suffers from unrobus

arXiv:2607.08340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Q-learning is a fundamental algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL) for solving discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) when the transition kernel is unknown. The deep Q-network (DQN) extends Q-learning by using a deep neural network for Q-function approximation, which makes Q-learning applicable to more practical high-dimensional problems. Dueling Q-learning decomposes the Q-function into a value function and an advantage function and learns

arXiv:2607.08373v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Connected vehicles are autonomous cyber-physical systems whose behavior must be continuously monitored during operation to detect deviations from normal operation before they propagate into failures. Such evaluation is challenging because the systems themselves evolve: over-the-air updates, configuration changes, and shifting workloads alter the definition of normal behavior, causing static diagnostic methods to degrade silently over time. Existing

arXiv:2607.08377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncertainty quantification is central to the reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs), and eigenvalues of semantic embeddings have recently emerged as a key tool in state-of-the-art methods. However, conventional calibration results developed for classification probabilities cannot be directly transferred to eigenvalues. We address this gap by proposing a novel framework for calibrating the eigenvalues of semantic embeddings. We interpre

arXiv:2607.08380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An important quantity in the theory of gradient descent (GD) is the \emph{sharpness}, defined as the largest eigenvalue of the objective Hessian. Classical analyses typically require the step size to be uniformly smaller than twice the reciprocal of the sharpness, but this condition is frequently violated in the training of deep neural networks. Recent work bridges this gap in the setting of overparametrised least-squares with a \emph{single scalar

arXiv:2607.08406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) dominates deep learning training, but its reliance on gradients brings inherent troubles -- vanishing and exploding gradients. The pursuit of gradient-free methods has long been a goal in the field of artificial intelligence. This paper shows that indeed the simplest Monte Carlo algorithm implemented on a single GPU -- randomly mutate a parameter, keep it if the loss decreases, otherwise retry -- can practically train deep netw

arXiv:2607.08429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Male infertility is a significant yet often underdiagnosed aspect of reproductive health, with semen analysis serving as the cornerstone of clinical evaluation. To address this problem, this study investigates the use of machine learning algorithms to classify male fertility status based on key semen parameters, i.e., sperm concentration, motility, and morphology, using the VISEM dataset. This dataset includes semen samples from 85 participants, cl

arXiv:2607.08561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A series of results from the NeuroAI over the past fifteen years have raised core questions both about how to compare Deep Neural Network (DNN) models to the brain, and about how much convergent evolution to expect between artificial networks and real brain networks. Here, we show that for any two minimal DNN solutions to a sufficiently hard task: (i) "weak" alignment of network representations based on affine mappings guarantees "strong" alignment

arXiv:2607.08581v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) computes output weights analytically using the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse. Although this leads to fast training, its numerical stability depends strongly on the conditioning of the hidden layer matrix. This paper studies pseudoinverse-based ELM from a spectral perspective. We show that the smallest singular value governs perturbation amplification in the output weights, while the condition number provides a quantitat

arXiv:2607.08595v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cardiovascular disease risk prediction models often rely on data from a single institution or centrally pooled datasets. Extending these models across institutions could be limited by privacy regulations and constraints on sharing patient-level data. Federated learning enables collaborative model development without transferring sensitive patient data, but its application in healthcare remains challenging because datasets often differ in size, popu

arXiv:2607.08641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over the last few years, there has been an increased interest in making machine learning models more interpretable. Although a great deal of effort goes into developing techniques for interpreting the interactions learned by a given model, fewer studies focus on assessing the quality of such explanations. Even fewer focus on how to adjust the model to produce explanations faithful to prior knowledge, a process known as explanation-guided learning.