The Latest Papers about AI
-
Robust Offset-Free Lane-Keeping Control Framework for Vision-Only Automated Vehicles
Abstract
Achieving accurate, real-time lane-keeping control during high-speed cornering on large-curvature roads while ensuring robust vehicle stability is a critical challenge in autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this study developed a robust offset-free model predictive control (OF-MPC) framework for vision-based autonomous vehicle lane-keeping. The regulation problem in this framework is solved using several algorithms. Numerical simulation results indicated that the interpolation-tube-based constrained iterative linear quadratic regulator (itube-CILQR) algorithm outperformed solvers based on the standard Interior Point Optimizer (IPOPT) and Operator Splitting Quadratic Program (OSQP), achieving a mean computation time of less than 5 ms. The itube-CILQR algorithm was then used for vehicle control in vision-based lane-keeping experiments in a simulation environment to quantify the perceptual uncertainty of a visual perception model (multitask UNet). This quantification was performed using the OF-MPC framework for traffic scenes that were not encountered during model training. Overall, the developed OF-MPC framework and the proposed method for characterizing the perceptual uncertainty of a visual perception system in unseen environments can contribute to the future development of advanced autonomous driving systems.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32666
PDF
-
Do Language Models Trust Their Own Justifications? A Study on Functional Consistency
2026-10-23 14:08:32Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in text classification tasks, where they not only output class predictions but also generate explanations that highlight the tokens deemed most relevant for reaching the predicted label. Yet it remains unclear whether these highlighted elements are behaviorally consistent with the model's own predictions under targeted interventions, which we refer to as functional auto-consistency. While much of the literature evaluates the textual plausibility of such explanations, few studies assess their functional consistency with the model's actual behavior. In this work, we propose an experimental framework based on the principle of auto-consistency: if a model identifies certain tokens as decisive, then isolating, removing, or semantically inverting them should produce systematic and interpretable changes in its predictions. We operationalize this evaluation through sufficiency, comprehensiveness, and counterfactuality metrics, and conduct experiments on IMDB and Steam reviews across both closed-source (GPT-4o-mini) and open-source LLMs (Gemma3, Granite8B, DeepSeek). Results show that GPT-4o-mini follows the expected progression across all metrics, Gemma3 and Granite8B maintain coherence under sufficiency but lose consistency under more demanding interventions, while DeepSeek variants display structural deviations, either failing to preserve sufficiency or overreacting under comprehensiveness and counterfactuality. These findings show that explanation reliability varies across LLM families and scales, with smaller models displaying contradictions and larger ones exhibiting over-sensitivity. By combining sufficiency, comprehensiveness, and counterfactuality, our approach provides a systematic methodology for assessing the functional consistency of LLM self-explanations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32665
PDF
-
The Answer Knows Where to Look: Zooming before MLLMs Answer under Visual-Token Budgets
Abstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) read images through visual tokens, and under the small per-image budgets that efficient deployment requires, the fine text of documents, charts and infographics becomes illegible. Zooming in recovers the evidence, but the region must be chosen before the model answers. We find that MLLMs know where the evidence is, but not in a form that can be read before they answer: the answer tokens localize it from the middle layers on, whereas the attention available before answering does so only in the top layers, at a depth that varies across models, and diffusely. Supervising the pre-answer attention to point degrades reading, and the benefit of zooming is governed by each image's information gap. Building on these findings, we introduce ours, which lets an MLLM look where its answer would. A dedicated look token, processed in a single prefill and kept out of the answering pass, learns in hindsight to attend as the model's own correct answers do, extracting this knowledge into a concentrated pointer before any answer exists. Its hidden state then selects how to look, from no zoom to crops, square windows, windows that adapt to the pointer and foveated warps, supervised by the counterfactual outcome of every view. ours needs no box annotations, per-model layer search, external localizers or generation before the answer. On Qwen3-VL at three scales and five text-rich benchmarks, it surpasses the strongest baseline by 4.8-9.1 points at 98 visual tokens per view and attention-guided zooming by 11.1-17.0 points, while running faster than attention-guided and grounding-based zooming.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32664
PDF
-
SemGeo-Gen: Unsupervised Generation of Approximate Cross-Instance Semantic-Geometric Correspondences
Abstract
We introduce SemGeo-Gen, an unsupervised method for generating approximate cross-instance semantic-geometric supervision from weakly aligned 3D object collections. Our goal is not to recover exact point-level correspondences, which are often ambiguous across different instances and would require expensive, impractical manual supervision at scale. Instead, we automatically produce approximate correspondences that are semantically meaningful, geometrically consistent, and diverse enough to train modern correspondence models. Given only coarse category-level rotation alignment, SemGeo-Gen lifts multi-view DINOv2 features to 3D, aligns object instances using continuous piecewise-affine registration, and prunes candidate matches using semantic consistency. The resulting 3D correspondences can be projected into rendered views, yielding scalable 3D-3D, 3D-2D, and 2D-2D supervision without manual annotation. We validate the generated correspondences against sparse human annotations from KeypointNet, obtaining 93% PCK@0.10 and 97% PCK@0.15. More importantly, we show that using the generated correspondences for synthetic pretraining improves recent state-of-the-art semantic correspondence models on SPair-71k after fine-tuning on real data, with gains of up to 5 PCK@0.10 points. Together, these results indicate that approximate semantic-geometric supervision generated from 3D assets can improve real-image correspondence learning and serve as a scalable alternative to costly manual annotation. Project page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32663
PDF
-
WiMoT: Replay-Free Continual Wi-Fi Sensing via Moment Transport
Abstract
Continual Wi-Fi sensing must balance plasticity, learning new rooms or users, against stability, keeping earlier ones, yet nodes often cannot retain channel state information (CSI) for privacy and storage reasons. We propose WiMoT (Wi-Fi Moment Transport), which stores the per-class feature mean and covariance of every earlier domain instead of samples. When the representation changes, stored statistics become stale. WiMoT restricts the change to an affine map on a frozen feature basis and applies the same map to the statistics, so they stay valid without old samples. Supervised contrastive learning learns the new domain, a closed-form loss on the stored statistics keeps earlier classes separable, and a Gaussian discriminant classifier, refitted from the transported statistics with equal weight per domain, predicts without domain identity. On 3DO, WiMANS, and Widar3.0, WiMoT's average final accuracies are 94.02%, 89.61%, and 95.16% with at most 0.58 percentage points (pp) of forgetting. On 3DO and Widar3.0, it also has the highest balance of new- and earlier-domain accuracy and is 3.77 and 13.11 pp ahead of the strongest of 21 baselines, which uses replay, staying ahead across domain orders and label budgets. On WiMANS, it matches the strongest replay baseline in accuracy (+0.41 pp) while reducing forgetting from 2.78 to 0.00 pp, and has the highest six-order average accuracy. Because full covariances dominate the memory, storing them as rank-32 factors shrinks the moment memory to 6.4%, losing at most 0.49 pp of accuracy, within edge-node storage budgets.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32660
PDF
-
Computational imaging through turbid, bubbly and flowing water near the telescope
Abstract
Cameras in the surf zone or behind ship wakes look through turbid, bubbly, moving water close to the lens, yet restoration networks are usually scored only on displayed images. We introduce a measured dataset of a telescope viewing displayed images and physical objects through a 25~mm water layer 45~mm in front of its objective, under seven combinations of flow, bubbles and turbidity, with clear-water recordings as a second reference. Because the suspension scatters light far outside the 1.3\textdegree{} field of view, turbidity mainly removes contrast, 4.4- to 4.8-fold on a Siemens star. Restoring the mean of eight frames improves structural similarity (SSIM) by 0.032 over a single frame, and learned fusion of the frames adds little. One raw frame supports five-category recognition (96.8\%) as well as restored images. Adding synthetic training pairs leaves display-image scores unchanged but raises the correlation of a restored Siemens star with its clear-water recording from below 0.5 to above 0.9. These networks also improve ordinary underwater photographs without retraining, where training on measured pairs alone fails. Scoring against the digital source or a clear-water recording reverses the ranking of raw and restored images. These results support a simple pipeline: average the frames, classify raw frames directly, and restore with networks trained on measured and synthetic pairs.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32646
PDF
-
Monte Carlo-Based Indoor UAV Localization in Dynamic Environments Using Only Four Onboard Range Sensors
Abstract
Indoor UAV localization with minimal onboard sensing remains challenging, particularly in dynamic environments. We propose augmented filtered Monte Carlo localization (AF-MCL) for 2D localization using only four single-point range sensors and measured heading. AF-MCL rejects range measurements inconsistent with the known static map and adaptively injects particles to recover from localization divergence and kidnapping. Beam classification is performed only at the previous position estimate, making its ray-casting cost independent of the particle count. The particle distribution additionally provides an online measure of localization uncertainty. Real-world experiments in a 2.10x1.63 m environment yield mean position errors of 6.4-7.7 cm under static and dynamic conditions. Simulations in 6x6 m and 10x10 m environments yield 4.5-5.2 cm mean errors; under dynamic obstacles, standard MCL reaches 12.3 cm and reliable MCL 7.7 cm. The results show that robust indoor localization under dynamic obstacles is achievable with only four single-point range measurements and heading.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32645
PDF
-
InferSlice: A Reference Architecture for SLO-driven LLM Inference over a Telco Wide-Area Network
Abstract
LLM inference is increasingly deployed as a core service for enterprise and interactive applications, but sovereignty, compliance, latency and resource-locality requirements can limit the suitability of centralised cloud deployments. Telco operators offer geographically distributed compute and network infrastructure for addressing these constraints. However, existing LLM serving frameworks are designed for tightly coupled data centres and provide limited support for coordinating geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources. We present InferSlice, a reference architecture for Service-Level Objective (SLO)-driven LLM inference over a telco infrastructure, integrating network slicing, GPU partitioning, elastic serving and observability. Led by BT in collaboration with the University of Bristol and NVIDIA, and realised on the JOINER UK national-scale wide-area network (WAN), InferSlice is evaluated on service differentiation across tiers, elastic scale-out, client-edge bandwidth as a bottleneck, and the reach of tensor, pipeline, data parallelism, and prefill/decode disaggregation over the WAN. Our results show that, on a general-purpose telco network, tiers yield distinct latency-throughput regimes, and weight streaming shortens scale-out time. Replication is placement-insensitive but memory-bound; pipeline parallelism tolerates near- and mid-cross-site hops, while tensor parallelism and disaggregation fail beyond a single subnet hop. We share practical insights from operating SLO-driven inference on a telco network, lessons learned and open questions, and hope to encourage further research on distributed and heterogeneous LLM inference systems.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32638
PDF
-
Residual Expert Routing for Text-Only Domain Adaptation of Factorized Transducer ASR
Abstract
Fine-tuning the non-blank predictor of a factorized transducer on target-domain text improves recognition on that domain but degrades performance on the source domain. A single interpolation weight between base and adapted predictors cannot resolve this: the adapted predictor helps at some prefixes and hurts at others, often within one utterance. We propose conservative residual routing: the adapted predictor becomes a residual correction to the base, and a 16k-parameter gate decides at each prefix how much of it to admit. Closing the gate reproduces the base exactly. On a 40-hour conversational corpus, routing retains essentially all of the text-only gain on two held-out domains (19.89 to 16.74, 20.91 to 16.21 WER) while leaving source-domain WER unchanged (12.90 to 12.93); the adapted predictor alone costs 1.08 WER. Routing needs no per-domain tuning on target-domain audio. Analysis reveals the gate does not behave as a simple domain-level switch: it modulates intervention through the disagreement between the two predictors, suppressing it in-domain and amplifying it out-of-domain.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32637
PDF
-
Can AI Agents Help Robotic Engineers? Lessons from Two Focus Days in Industry
Abstract
Software developers increasingly use AI agents that execute multi-step programming tasks on their own. However, it is unclear if and how this transfers to robotic engineering, where engineers program industrial robots in niche, vendor-specific languages and rely on visual feedback from simulation tools. Within this paper, we report a case study on the use of AI agents by an SME that programs industrial robots. Our results show that the agent did not make the engineers more productive, with the exception of a task that required the generation of highly repetitive code. However, the results with the agent improved over time, as the engineers learned how to use it and the agent was adapted to the domain. Moreover, the experience with AI mattered more for the success with the agent than the experience with robotic engineering. This shows that AI agents are not a plug-and-play solution. Instead, companies must train their engineers on the usage of agents, plan time for a learning curve, and ensure that agent configurations match the domain and developer requirements. The strong learning curve we observed further implies that studies on productivity gains with AI should be longitudinal, as they otherwise miss how engineers adopt agents in practice.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32636
PDF
-
EditJev: System One Routing for Image Editing Models
Abstract
Instruction-based image editing models exhibit pronounced sample-specific performance variation: different models can produce substantially different results for the same source image and editing instruction, and the best-performing model often varies across requests. These models also differ substantially in inference latency, making fixed-model deployment inefficient. We therefore study image editing model routing, which dynamically selects an editor from a candidate pool given an input image and editing instruction. We introduce EditJev, a System One routing model that directly predicts sample-level preference scores over candidate image editing models in a single forward pass. A lightweight preference head on a vision-language backbone produces a fixed-dimensional score vector without autoregressive model-name generation or response parsing. To train EditJev, we construct pairwise preferences from offline candidate outputs and optimize a pairwise ranking objective to learn relative model suitability. At inference time, EditJev combines the predicted preference scores with model-level speed scores to balance editing quality and generation latency. Experiments on ImgEdit and GEdit-En show that EditJev improves aggregate quality over the strongest fixed editor, from 4.540 to 4.592 and from 8.194 to 8.255, respectively, while reducing estimated end-to-end latency by 60.8% and 31.7%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of direct, structured model routing for efficient image editing.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32635
PDF
-
Natural-Language to Nav2: Operational Policies for Costmap-Based Navigation
Abstract
Autonomous mobile robots support material transport in warehouses and industrial facilities, where navigation must adapt to changing operating conditions. Sensor observations reveal physical obstacles, but do not by themselves specify temporary access rules, route preferences, or exceptions known to operators. This paper presents a natural-language policy interface that brings this knowledge into ROS 2 Nav2. A local large language model converts instructions into JSON policies specifying destinations, spatial constraints, and temporal or event conditions. Deterministic checks govern mission acceptance, and three costmap adapters project accepted policies into the existing navigation stack without changing its planner or controller. On 150 researcher-authored English commands, four local models produce 107-142 correct accepted policies, compared with 44 for a rule-based parser, with 3-20 incorrect acceptances per model. Fault injection records rejection of eight endpoint/JSON faults and 29 validator-stage faults. Navigation experiments use correct task policies to evaluate keepouts, zone costs, person-dependent regions, and event-conditioned passage in simulation and on a TurtleBot3. For Tasks 1-3, mean travel times are 18.4-24.5% lower in simulation and 23.1-35.0% lower on the physical testbed than with the baseline lacking those policies. A native KeepoutFilter comparison and two-robot demonstrations examine basic keepout behavior and shared policy projection. The interface connects operator instructions to explicit navigation policies while retaining Nav2's planning and control components.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32633
PDF
-
Interpretable Singing Emotion Recognition Using Acoustic and Vocal Technique Features
Abstract
Singing emotion recognition relies predominantly on deep learning models that achieve strong performance but offer limited insight into the vocal characteristics driving emotion, of- ten overlooking the singing voice as a distinct signal. We propose an interpretable singing emotion recognition framework using a compact set of singing-specific descriptors across prosody, spec- tral features, phonetics, and vocal technique. To decode model decisions and link predictions to measurable acoustic phenomena, we employ SHAP and apply GRAD-CAM to qualitatively assess the learned representations of vocal techniques. Evaluations show that singing-specific features reduce cross-singer variability, while vocal technique descriptors provide interpretable insights into singing expression. Furthermore, out-of-domain evaluation on VocalSet reveals interesting associations between emotional expression and ground-truth technical execution. The analysis highlights vibrato and pharyngeal techniques as salient cues of emotional delivery, with SHAP indicating that vibrato is context-dependent on articulation rate. These findings emphasize the value of domain-specific features for interpretable singing emotion analysis.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32629
PDF
-
LGMT: A Tool for Testing the Logical Reasoning Reliability of LLMs
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly serve as reasoning components in modern software systems, yet a model that answers a logical query correctly can contradict itself when the same problem is restated in an equivalent form. Static benchmarks evaluate queries in isolation and therefore fail to expose such inconsistencies. To address this limitation, we present LGMT, an open-source tool that detects reasoning inconsistencies through metamorphic relations grounded in first-order logic. Given a source test case in premise-conclusion form, LGMT generates logically equivalent follow-up cases and checks whether the model's entailment predictions agree across the pair, without ground-truth labels. The tool provides 20 built-in metamorphic relations, supports custom ones verified by the Z3 theorem prover, and runs from a CLI or a web studio, including an offline mock mode requiring no API key. Across six widely used LLMs on a bundled benchmark of 3,091 metamorphic groups, LGMT reveals inconsistency rates ranging from 20.84% to 29.44%. LGMT is publicly available on GitHub at this https URL, with a demonstration video at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32627
PDF
-
What Transfers Across Protein Pockets? Experience Reuse in Molecular Optimization for Agentic Structure-Based Drug Design
Abstract
LLM agents optimize a ligand in a protein pocket by editing it step by step and docking each edit. Recent agents first spend extra dockings probing the complex with controlled edits; guidance induced from these probes is reported to help more than the chemical knowledge the model already carries. The probes are then discarded with the instance that produced them, so the obvious next step is to keep them in an experience base, letting a new pocket inherit what earlier ones already paid for. Such a base is read through a \emph{key}: the record properties under which past edits are pooled and a new one is looked up. Using the full log of one such run over the CrossDocked2020 test-set pockets, we ask whether its keys recur on a pocket the base has never seen and still separate improving from worsening edits. \crchange{Using} the contacts at the site being edited, the action, and the round as \crchange{a} key, the base separates them sharply. Within our analysis, this separation is largely explained by how much the edit changed the molecule's size, the action, and the round, none of which describes the target. That is not because the target is irrelevant: naming it outright separates them several times more sharply. For a pocket absent from the base, transfer must rely on a description rather than its identity. Among the exact-match descriptions we evaluate, the more specific ones rarely recur, whereas the coarser ones provide little separation; the signals that do transfer primarily describe the edit and the molecule it produced rather than the target. Under the representations and lookup scheme studied here, an experience base may be more useful for prioritizing an agent's own proposals for docking than for directly prescribing what to build.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32620
PDF
-
Earth embeddings are decomposable records of the land surface
Abstract
Ecological monitoring, carbon accounting and biodiversity assessment increasingly rely on annual Earth embeddings--learned vectors that compress a year of satellite observation for every ten-meter pixel on Earth, consumed in place of the imagery itself. What these vectors mean has not been established. Here we decompose two widely used embedding products and show that they contain individual ecological features, including fire, forest clearing and crop type, validated against independent reference data on events across six continents. The recovered concepts date abrupt canopy loss to the first post-disturbance growing season and resolve severity well enough to separate prescribed fire from wildfire. Small fires that recover quickly are detectable in one product but not the other, which instead separates crops more strongly.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32617
PDF
-
DriveOSS: Dataset and Benchmark for 3D Anomaly Segmentation and Open-set Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving
2026-10-23 13:33:39Abstract
Recent advances in 3D semantic segmentation have significantly improved scene understanding in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are typically developed under a closed-set assumption and evaluated under standard driving conditions, where all categories are known in advance. In real-world driving, autonomous vehicles inevitably encounter previously unseen objects, making closed-set perception insufficient for safe deployment. To address this challenge, we introduce DriveOSS, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first real-world multimodal dataset and benchmark specifically designed for 3D anomaly segmentation and open-set semantic segmentation. It contains 12,661 synchronized and annotated frames captured using six surround-view RGB cameras, a 128-beam LiDAR, and a GPS/IMU unit. The dataset comprises 52 real-world driving scenes collected under clear, nighttime, cloudy, rainy, and snowy conditions and is organized into ID (in-distribution) and OOD (out-of-distribution) subsets. The ID scenes contain only known classes and are used for training, whereas the OOD scenes additionally contain unknown objects annotated as the outlier class and are used for validation and testing. Extensive experiments show that unseen objects remain a major challenge for current 3D perception systems. The dataset, benchmark protocols, and code are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32612
PDF
-
Hair Segmentation and Skin Characterization on Macroscopic Dermatological Images for Laser Treatment Parameterization
Abstract
Current light-based devices, such as laser hair removal, intense pulsed light (IPL), vascular laser therapy, and dermatologic phototherapy, are widely used in clinical dermatology but rely heavily on subjective manual parameterization or uncalibrated point-based colorimeters. To overcome these limitations, this work presents a unified system for hair segmentation and skin characterization in macroscopic dermatological images. Unlike most existing literature that relies on dermoscopic datasets captured under highly controlled conditions, our approach is specifically designed for macroscopic images that replicate real clinical laser treatments. The proposed pipeline integrates a custom-trained variant of the YOLOv9 deep learning architecture for instance segmentation and classical image processing within a single workflow to extract objective skin and hair parameters such as phototype, hair density, color, and thickness. A color calibration stage using spectrophotometric measurements ensures accurate feature estimation regardless of illumination conditions. Experimental results show competitive segmentation metrics (mAP@50 $\approx$ 0.80) on a custom dataset featuring short, shaved hairs, typical of pre-treatment scenarios. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed pipeline in providing the objective, foundational skin and hair features required for future automated laser parameterization, paving the way for its extension to broader light-based medical therapies.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32609
PDF
-
LLaCO: Continuous Diffusion for Large Language Models with Competition-Aware Semantic Scheduling
2026-10-23 13:28:40Abstract
Continuous diffusion models have emerged as a promising non-autoregressive paradigm for text generation over continuous embedding spaces. Along the continuous trajectory, the residual token identity directly shapes the denoising objective. However, the geometric trajectory misaligns with temporal progression, triggering severe temporal compression. In this paper, we show that embedding norm decay causes Euclidean distance to yield spurious overtaking, indicating that token competition must be evaluated directionally. In this space, a candidate overtakes the source token only when the effective noise magnitude surpasses their semantic separation. We formalize these pairwise dynamics as the Competition Threshold Theory (CTT). Crucially, high-dimensional overtaking requires extreme noise levels, causing standard trajectories to concentrate identity decay into a narrow window near the noisy endpoint. To resolve this, we propose Semantic Retention Scheduling (SRS) to align time allocation with the progression of identity decay, and demonstrate that existing token identity metrics are fundamentally statistical aggregations of these pairwise crossings. Building on these theoretical insights, we introduce LLaCO, a generative framework powered by competition-aware semantic scheduling. LLaCO adapts a pretrained backbone to continuous representations via an embedding directional adapter and timestep-conditioned modulation. To operate within the directional space, LLaCO employs a spherical noising process formulated as a geodesic interpolation toward a mask-biased endpoint, eliminating norm decay while preserving accurate token competition. Guided by SRS, LLaCO reallocates the denoising trajectory proportionally to the logarithmic rank decay. Instantiated as an 8B model, LLaCO outperforms previous continuous diffusion baselines and rivals discrete diffusion models of comparable scale.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32604
PDF
-
Barycentric Guidance: Turning Foundation Image Editors into Continuous Affective Controllers
Abstract
Emotions are expressed on a continuum and are naturally described in the valence-arousal (VA) space. Existing VA-based image editors are typically training-based and domain-specific, limiting them to VA regions seen during training and making them brittle across datasets and domains. Meanwhile, despite producing high-quality edits, state-of-the-art foundation image editors are not continuous affective controllers: non-linear emotion representations in text encoders makes prompt interpolation poorly calibrated, so accurate and continuous VA control remains unreliable. To fill this gap, we introduce Barycentric Guidance, a training-free framework that turns pretrained foundation image editors into continuous affective controllers over VA, requiring no finetuning, extra data, or model changes. Our method maps any target VA point to simplex-based guidance weights, enabling VA controllability in three aspects: (i) accurate targeting of VA states, (ii) broad coverage across the VA plane, and (iii) continuous control. Across three face datasets, we improve VA target accuracy by 25-29%, expand VA-plane coverage by 28-50%, and increase expression diversity by 29-49%, over the strongest baseline. Unlike prior domain-specific methods, our training-free approach exploits the foundation model's inherent versatility, enabling generalization beyond human faces to animals, artworks, and complex scenes within a single framework. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16892
PDF
