Attention
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Beyond Discrimination: Evaluating Probability Calibration in Radiomics-Image Fusion for Renal Cell Carcinoma Classification
2026-10-09 15:50:47Yuan Liang, Morgan May, Abraham Campbell, Sourav Bhattacharjee, Simon Caton, Pierpaolo DondioAbstract
Reliable probability estimates are important for the clinical interpretation of machine-learning classifiers, yet radiomics--image fusion models for renal cell carcinoma (RCC) are commonly evaluated primarily by discrimination. Using 396 patients from the KiTS23 dataset, we evaluated whether adding radiomics to four image-model families improved probabilistic performance in addition to discrimination. Seventeen individual models and four probability-average ensembles were assessed using discrimination, probability calibration, and proper scoring measures. Across 12 matched image-only versus fusion comparisons, AUC and AP improved in all 12, while Brier score and negative log likelihood (NLL) improved in 11 of 12 and expected calibration error (ECE) in eight of 12. The 3D MedVAE gated-fusion model achieved the strongest overall individual-model profile. Probability averaging across concatenation, cross-attention, and gated fusion produced favourable point estimates across all five primary metrics relative to image-only models in all four families, although paired-bootstrap support was stronger for Brier score and NLL than for ECE. These findings show that radiomics--image fusion can improve probabilistic prediction quality beyond discrimination, while calibration behaviour varies across image architectures and fusion strategies. We show that our proposed probability-average ensemble models improve discrimination and calibration simultaneously across all architectures in the study.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14151
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SmolWAM: A Latent World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation on Edge Devices
2026-10-09 15:34:33Timi Owolabi, Hikmah Olawore, Frances Adelakun, Ayotomiwa OyewumiAbstract
World-action models (WAMs) predict a robot's actions together with the observations those actions will produce. However, the strongest models rely on video diffusion transformers that are far too computationally expensive for resource-constrained edge devices. We present SmolWAM, a latent WAM that we derive from the 2B-parameter Cosmos Policy by keeping its pretrained trunk and rebuilding its inference interface: single-frame visual latents, cached text features that preserve the trunk's attention sinks, 12 of 28 transformer blocks, and 1,008 tokens from which actions and future visual latents are read out in one rectified-flow step. Trained in 3.6 GPU-hours, SmolWAM succeeds in 95.5% of 400 LIBERO episodes at 57 ms and 2.3 TFLOP per 16-action chunk with 2.4 GiB of GPU memory, 11x faster than its teacher with 18.5x fewer FLOPs and 3.2x less memory, and its world head still forecasts scene motion.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13740
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Orthros: Phase-Aware Heterogeneous Attention for Efficient Transformers
2026-10-09 15:30:08Yuhong Chou, Zehao Liu, Yuqi Pan, Qian Liu, Xianwei Chen, Zhongzhu Zhou, Jibin WuAbstract
Efficient attention mechanisms, such as linear and sliding window attention, aim to reduce the computational complexity of Transformers from quadratic to linear. However, their degraded in-context recall often necessitates interleaving full attention layers, leaving the quadratic bottleneck unresolved in long-context processing. To address this, we introduce Orthros attention, which shifts the efficiency paradigm from structural allocation to phase-aware decoupling. As a unified module, it dynamically switches its computation pattern across different phases of sequence processing, enabling linear complexity prefilling and full attention decoding. Our design grants Orthros attention a lower asymptotic complexity compared to vanilla Transformers in prevalent long-context scenarios characterized by heavy prefilling and light decoding. Beyond theoretical formulation and complexity analysis, extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate Orthros's superiority across multiple dimensions. First, we validate its fundamental language modeling capabilities, demonstrating scalability across varying model sizes and strong competitiveness in comprehensive architectural comparisons. Second, Orthros exhibits exceptional conversion feasibility via a data-efficient Transformer-to-Orthros conversion, yielding performance that even surpasses the original Transformer. Finally, Orthros achieves a $21.9\times$ prefilling speedup over Transformers with end-to-end inference gains, while preserving long-context capabilities, as demonstrated by near-perfect 128K needle-in-a-haystack results and Transformer-level performance on real-world in-context recall tasks. Overall, these advantages in high performance, flexibility, and efficiency position Orthros as a promising candidate to succeed the Transformer in industrial applications.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13735
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X-AVDD: Cross-Attentive Audio-Visual Dataset Distillation
2026-10-09 14:51:26Saumyaranjan Mohanty, Aravind Reddy, Konda Reddy MopuriAbstract
Audio-visual dataset distillation aims to synthesize a small dataset from a large paired audio-visual dataset, while nearly preserving the training utility for neural networks. Existing approaches such as DM and AVDD face two critical limitations: 1) they are memory-intensive, making them difficult to scale to complex architectures and higher samples-per-class (SPC) settings, and 2) they often fail to preserve strong cross-modal semantic correspondence. To tackle these issues, we propose X-AVDD, a cross-attention-based distillation method that explicitly captures inter-modal relationships during synthesis. By decoupling cross-modal alignment from joint optimization, X-AVDD is substantially more memory-efficient, reducing end-to-end synthesis cost by $\sim 8\times$ GPU-hours, while producing highly aligned synthetic data. Empirically, X-AVDD significantly outperforms other audio-visual distillation methods. On VGGSound, an audio-visual dataset of short YouTube clips, X-AVDD improves top-1 test accuracy from $8.2\%\rightarrow24.0\%$ at SPC=$10$ and $9.8\%\rightarrow26.5\%$ at SPC=$20$. Furthermore, X-AVDD improves cross-architecture generalization (e.g., $25.5\%\rightarrow35.3\%$ for a ViT target on AVE dataset at SPC $=50$) and successfully scales to complex architectures such as AudioCLIP, achieving $62.3\%$ accuracy using only $5.65\%$ of the full dataset, against the full dataset accuracy of $72.4\%$ while completing in $9\times$ lower training time compared to the full dataset.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13687
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Not All Dimensions Are Equal: Outlier-Aware Attention Linearization with Grouped Quadratic Kernels
2026-10-09 14:40:19Weiqi Sun, Qianyue Wu, Wenjia Wang, Tianyang HuAbstract
Linearizing softmax attention offers a route to efficient Transformer inference, but preserving pretrained attention remains challenging. We identify an important source of approximation error overlooked by standard linearization methods: a small number of outlier dimensions contribute disproportionately to query-key dot products and account for a large fraction of the approximation error. Motivated by this heterogeneity, we propose Outlier-Aware Attention Linearization (OAL), a dimension-aware method for constructing quadratic attention approximations. Starting from a second-order Taylor approximation, we introduce a Hadamard-product formulation that makes individual query-key contributions explicit. This formulation relaxes globally shared coefficients to support dimension-specific linear terms and cross-dimensional quadratic interactions while preserving separable evaluation. To retain this flexibility with fewer parameters, OAL groups dimensions with similar contribution scales to share coefficients, while allowing distinct treatment of the few outliers. The resulting positive quadratic kernel is calibrated against pretrained attention outputs and admits linear-time evaluation with respect to sequence length for fixed head dimensions. On Qwen2.5-0.5B, OAL reduces frozen-attention output relative MSE by approximately 8.9% compared with DiJiang. Replacing middle-layer attention modules and jointly fine-tuning the kernel coefficients with LoRA further lowers WikiText-103 perplexity from 31.71 to 27.50 compared with a learned global quadratic, while improving accuracy on PIQA, HellaSwag, and ARC-E. These results demonstrate the value of outlier-aware dimension grouping for both attention approximation and pretrained-model conversion. The code is available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13674
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Multi-Stream Attention Residuals
2026-10-09 14:13:02Xiaohan Qin, Xiangdong Zhang, Tuo Dai, Sunan Zou, Huaijin Wu, Yebin Yang, Zhuo Xia, Lin Yao, Yuliang Liu, Junchi YanAbstract
Attention Residuals (AttnRes) enables content-dependent retrieval over network depth, which can be viewed as single-stream softmax attention along the depth axis. Inspired by the success of multi-head attention along the sequence axis, we introduce Multi-Stream Attention Residuals (MSAR), an extension of AttnRes that generalizes this mechanism to multi-head depth attention, yielding substantial performance gains with minimal additional overhead. MSAR draws stream diversity from sequence context through multi-scale causal convolutions, allowing different heads to retrieve historical representations through distinct contextual views while preserving the integrity of the hidden representation. The retrieved streams are combined through lightweight adaptive mixing to generate the single-stream layer input. By retaining single-stream sources and expanding them on demand, MSAR supports multi-stream computation without requiring persistent multi-stream storage or communication. Across all 12 downstream benchmarks at the 18B and 28B MoE scales, MSAR consistently outperforms prior residual variants, including standard residual connections, manifold-constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC), and AttnRes. Scaling-law experiments yield an iso-loss compute speedup of $1.58\times$ over the standard residual baseline, compared with $1.35\times$ for AttnRes and $1.30\times$ for mHC. These results make MSAR a promising residual architecture for large-scale pre-training.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13630
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Training User Simulators with Latent Intrinsic Feedback
2026-10-09 14:00:36Tarek Naous, Craig Boutilier, Wei Xu, Ofer MeshiAbstract
User simulators are gaining attention as environments to train LLM assistants that can better cope with the nuances of multi-turn conversations with real users. Prior work on user simulation has emphasized generating realistic user utterances, leaving unexplored their potential as a source of direct feedback on the assistant's responses. Such evaluation signals may not be explicitly communicated in language, but can instead reside in the latent reasoning of users. In this work, we introduce user simulators with intrinsic feedback, namely, models equipped with latent evaluation states: internal thoughts, reactions, and scalar ratings that evaluate the assistant from a first-person user perspective at each conversation turn. We train LLM-based simulators using interaction logs between real users and assistants and demonstrate that intrinsic feedback improves simulation realism and critiquing behaviors versus prompted simulator baselines, while also providing turn-level evaluations that existing fine-tuned simulators lack. Further, evaluations generated by our trained simulators correlate better with human judgments than those of prompted simulators of the same size. Lastly, our experiments reveal that simulators with intrinsic feedback provide effective reward signals for multi-turn RL training, matching setups that rely on external judge LLMs for rewards while cutting RL compute by more than half.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13617
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Thyroid Nodule Segmentation in Ultrasound Images with Conformal Uncertainty Estimation
2026-10-09 13:51:06Francesco Teodori, Pierpaolo Brutti, Umberto Ferraro PetrilloAbstract
Thyroid nodules affect a large proportion of the general population. Although most are benign, a non-negligible fraction is malignant. Ultrasound imaging is the primary diagnostic modality, and accurate nodule segmentation is a prerequisite for CAD systems to classify malignancy and assess metastatic risk.\\ In this work, we propose a thyroid nodule segmentation framework that integrates a DeepLabV3+, channel-attention modules and post-hoc conformal prediction, providing both accurate mask and pixel-level uncertainty estimates. We address thyroid ultrasound nodule segmentation as the first stage of a pipeline that also includes malignancy classification and metastatic risk prediction. We adopt DeepLabV3+, whose Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) captures multi-scale context, with an EfficientNet-B5 backbone for its accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Additionally, we test three channel-attention modules: Squeeze-and-Excitation, CBAM and Grouped Channel Attention (GCA), paired with two loss formulations (Dice-BCE and Boundary).\\ Since binary masks do not indicate prediction confidence, we wrap the trained model with a split conformal prediction layer that produces pixel-level uncertainty maps with statistical coverage guarantees.\\ We evaluate all configurations on the TN3K public benchmark using a fixed split and directly compare them with state-of-the-art methods. The plain backbone already improves upon previously reported results, with CBAM + Dice-BCE emerging as the best overall configuration.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13604
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AudioTETRIS: Token Elimination via Transitional Importance Signals for Efficient Audio LLMs
2026-10-09 13:49:22Shreya Sajid, Anna Vettoruzzo, Joaquin VanschorenAbstract
Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on speech-text tasks, but standard audio encoders produce hundreds of tokens for even short audio clips. Because self-attention scales quadratically in sequence length, this inflates inference-time compute substantially. Current training-free token compression methods prune or merge tokens based solely on coarse attention or feature similarity. However, treating audio tokens as generic, isotropic features smooths over spectral transitions, destroying fine-grained phonetic transitions essential for decoding speech. In contrast, speech signals exhibit highly structured temporal patterns where information density peaks at acoustic transitions. We propose AudioTETRIS, a training-free, two-stage framework that uses the audio encoder's representation geometry as an acoustic prior for token importance before applying attention-based compression. Instead of discarding encoder structure after the encoding stage, AudioTETRIS propagates this prior directly into the LLM decoder to compute a per-token fused score. This score drives progressive top-$k$ token selection across decoder layers without requiring additional training or auxiliary models. Evaluated on Qwen2-Audio-7B, Phi-4-Multimodal, and Audio Flamingo 3, AudioTETRIS retains near-uncompressed performance on several speech tasks using only 25% of audio tokens, matches or surpasses full-token accuracy at moderate compression rates, and consistently outperforms existing training-free baselines.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13600
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O'ido: Open-Vocabulary Speech Recognition on a $5 Microcontroller without a Neural Accelerator
2026-10-09 11:48:37Daniel Varela S\'anchez, Guillermo Mart\'in-Coello Ju\'arezAbstract
Speech recognition on low-cost microcontrollers is, in practice, limited to keyword spotting or a fixed list of commands. We present OÃdo, an inference engine that runs open-vocabulary English speech recognition entirely on an ESP32-S3 (240 MHz dual-core Xtensa LX7, 512 KB of SRAM, 8 MB of PSRAM, 16 MB of flash, no neural accelerator). OÃdo executes a 13M-parameter Conformer-CTC model with int8 weights, per-frame dynamic int8 activations and int8 attention on the chip's SIMD instructions, with a schedule designed around flash and PSRAM bandwidth. On LibriSpeech test-clean/test-other the on-device arithmetic reaches 3.70%/8.23% word error rate (WER), within 0.12 points of full precision, and 3.33%/7.15% with an on-chip 1.3M-parameter language model; a transducer head gives 2.99%/6.67% and an int4 variant fits in 8.3 MB. This is 2.3-2.8x fewer errors than the vendor's recognizer on the same chip, and fewer than Whisper this http URL and Moonshine tiny in full precision on a laptop, including in real noise and reverberation. Measured on a physical board, the firmware runs at 1.97x the duration of the audio on one core, with transcripts identical to an instruction-exact emulator: accurate, but not yet real time (a 4 s command is transcribed about 8.7 s after it ends). The two-core schedule gives wrong results on silicon and is disabled. A streaming variant shows partial text while the speaker talks and delivers the final text 4.1-11.1 s after clips of 3.6-10.6 s (7.2-22.4 s in utterance mode) at 4.86%/11.03% WER; a Spanish model makes 34-60% fewer errors than multilingual Whisper tiny. Code and models are released.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13447
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Robot-WATCHDOG : failure detection through object-centric graph representation
2026-10-09 11:19:25Quentin Rolland, Fabrice Mayran de Chamisso, Jean-Baptiste MouretAbstract
Reliable real-time failure detection is critical for deploying learned robotic policies, yet defining failures explicitly is infeasible in open-world settings. This motivates failure detection from nominal demonstrations alone. Existing methods, however, struggle to balance robustness to benign variations with the ability to capture semantic and interaction-level errors. We introduce Robot-WATCHDOG, a self-supervised framework that models manipulation scenes as object-centric spatio-temporal graphs. Building on this representation, we investigate two complementary failure scores: Trajectory Projection and Correlation (TPC), a non-parametric measure of geometric deviation and relational consistency, and GnnT, a Graph Attention Network with a Transformer that predicts future object states. We evaluate both on a public benchmark and on a new dataset of semantically complex manipulation tasks, across six tasks and ten random seeds. Both scores outperform image-based failure detectors, particularly on semantic and interaction-level failures. TPC provides the strongest performance in AUPR and MCC on both dataset averages, with low variance across seeds. Qualitative results are made available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13403
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PartiGen: Part-Aware Representations for Language-Conditioned Humanoid Motion Generation
2026-10-09 10:46:40Chuxuan Huang, Zhanxiang Cao, Tianyue Zhan, Haoyang Li, Yang Zhang, Liyun Yan, Chenlin Ming, Keqi Zhu, Yizhi Chen, Shengcheng Fu, Zihao Zhou, Xinyi Peng, Kaixuan Zhang, Boyang Xing, Jiawei Bao, Yang Yang, Yue GaoAbstract
Translating language into humanoid motion requires coordinating body parts, determining motion duration, and producing references suitable for robot execution. We introduce PartiGen, a part-aware latent diffusion framework that incorporates anatomical structure into a shared whole-body motion representation. Part-specific attention processes anatomically masked frame features, and its outputs are fused to combine local limb information with whole-body context. Conditioned on text and motion history, the model generates motion primitives autoregressively. Forward-kinematics supervision encourages kinematic consistency, while a learned end-of-sequence predictor selects a frame-level endpoint after generation. On HumanML3D retargeted to the Unitree G1, PartiGen achieves a segment-level FID of 3.165, a 16.8% reduction over TextOp, and improves R@1 by 1.4 percentage points. In the duration study with 16-frame primitives, endpoint prediction reduces mean absolute duration error from 12.471 to 3.080 frames compared with a fixed-length cutoff. We further evaluate robot execution using a pretrained, frozen GRIT tracker: 409 of 500 generated references (81.8%) pass the posture-based stability screen in MuJoCo. Following simulation screening and manual selection, 26 of 27 attempted motions are judged successful on the real G1.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13373
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Physics-Aware Self-Supervised Pretraining on Multi-Domain Raman Spectra
2026-10-09 10:43:46Charalampos Davalas, Georgios Levantinos, Anastasios Dimitriou, Nikolaos Papanikolaou, Georgios Th. Papadopoulos, Dimitrios MichailAbstract
Raman spectroscopy generates large volumes of unlabeled data that are difficult to exploit with conventional supervised learning. This work introduces a multi-domain self-supervised learning framework based on a masked autoencoder (MAE) for learning transferable Raman spectral representations from heterogeneous biological, chemical, forensic, and materials datasets. The proposed pretraining strategy incorporates physics-aware objectives by combining masked intensity reconstruction with a sparse Voigt-profile decoder that models spectral peak structure through differentiable peak centers, widths, and amplitudes. A denoising objective is further included to improve robustness to spectral corruption. The learned encoder is evaluated on substance classification, component identification, concentration estimation, and spectral denoising under linear probing, attention-based probing, end-to-end fine-tuning, and training from scratch. Experimental results show that self-supervised pretraining is most beneficial for challenging tasks with limited labeled data. Attention-based probing also reveals substantially more useful information in the frozen representation than linear probing, indicating that conventional linear evaluation may underestimate representation quality. In addition, the benefits of pretraining become more pronounced with increasing encoder capacity. Overall, the proposed framework demonstrates that physics-aware, multi-domain self-supervised pretraining can improve label efficiency, robustness, and transferability across diverse Raman spectroscopy tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23955
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Exploring Attention Sinks in Text-to-Image Transformers from Diffusion and Autoregressive Models
2026-10-09 10:10:51Binglei Li, Mengping Yang, Zhiyu Tan, Wenxu Qian, Junping Zhang, Hao LiAbstract
Attention sinks are tokens or positions that consistently receive disproportionate attention mass, often beyond what their semantic content would suggest. Despite extensive study in large language models, their behavior and functional relevance in text-to-image (T2I) Transformers remain largely unexplored. To fill this gap and better understand how text-to-image Transformers allocate and route attention, we explore this phenomenon of text-to-image transformers across bidirectional diffusion models and causal autoregressive models. Specifically, we explore whether attention sinks exist, where they emerge, and how they functionally influence generation. Through systematic attention analysis and targeted interventions, we identify that attention sinks emerge in both bidirectional diffusion and autoregressive models but exhibit distinct patterns. The autoregressive model concentrates attention on the first and global-scale tokens, whereas the bidirectional models develop sinks near modality boundaries, within text regions, and at spatial corners. Moreover, these patterns vary across generation stages and are localized to a sparse subset of layers and heads. To assess their functional relevance, we perturb sink-related heads and token positions. It turns out that perturbing sink-ranked heads produces larger average changes than non-sink comparisons, while some sink-position perturbations have limited effects on bidirectional model scores. We further introduce register tokens to redistribute attention sinks and find that several configurations preserve or modestly improve generation performance. Overall, attention sinks are architecture-, inference-stage-, and component-dependent phenomena, providing a basis for mechanistic analysis and principled attention design in text-to-image transformers.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13337
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LETHE: Defending against Unauthorized Image-to-Video Generation via Value Diversity Collapse
2026-10-09 10:08:39Boheng Li, Yueming Xing, Yiming Li, Jie Zhang, Tianwei ZhangAbstract
Image-to-video (I2V) diffusion models can animate a single reference image into high-quality, subject-consistent videos, posing threats of misuse as anyone can turn personal photos into fabricated videos without consent. A promising solution is to proactively add an adversarial perturbation to the image before release, such that videos generated from it would be unfaithful or visually corrupted. However, due to an insufficient understanding of what governs how subsequent frames read the reference image in modern I2V models, existing protections struggle to offer strong protection under common perturbation budgets. In this paper, we approach the problem by exploring this underlying reading mechanism. Through a convex geometric analysis, we theoretically identify the spread of the reference value vectors as a key factor governing this reading process, and empirically find that even a mild contraction of this spread can severely degrade the generated video, making it an efficient lever for protection. Guided by this insight, we propose LETHE, a novel protection method that directly disrupts this reading process. LETHE pairs two complementary objectives, where a value collapse objective drives the reference value vectors toward uniformity, while an attention attraction objective draws subsequent frames toward these collapsed tokens to amplify corruption. We further construct two human-centric I2V protection benchmarks and conduct extensive experiments with multiple modern I2V models, which demonstrate the state-of-the-art protection performance and versatility of LETHE.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13333
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Masked Diffusion Language Agents for Tool-Integrated Chemical Reasoning
2026-10-09 10:07:37Mengdi Liu, Chenghao Jia, Hong Chang, Shiguang ShanAbstract
Designing tool-integrated reasoning agent systems for complex chemical tasks remains a fundamental challenge. Although recent chemical agents have demonstrated promising performance through the integration of external tools, they are still built on the autoregressive paradigm, which is inherently constrained by causal attention and left-to-right generation. As a result, they often struggle with bidirectional molecular understanding, global coordinated tool planning and multi-source evidence integration. To address this challenge, we introduce ChemDiffAgent, the first masked diffusion language agent for tool-integrated chemical reasoning. It reformulates chemical reasoning as iterative denoising over interleaved reasoning and tool-use trajectories, enabling tool-use decisions to be jointly determined under full-trajectory context and thereby better aligning the agent's decision boundary with its knowledge boundary. We further analyze how this paradigm benefits agentic reasoning through harder infilling subproblems during training and flexible arbitrary-order decoding during inference. Then we develop a two-stage post-training framework, comprising agentic supervised fine-tuning and variance-reduced preference optimization, to enhance tool-use and reasoning capabilities. We also construct a comprehensive benchmark covering six chemistry tasks across both single-turn and multi-turn tool-use scenarios. Under matched budgets and evaluation, ChemDiffAgent consistently outperforms autoregressive agents, achieving an overall improvement of approximately 20%. Notably, our 8B model achieves performance comparable to, in some cases surpassing, significantly larger frontier models, such as GPT 5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13330
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ThinkDrag: Semantic Drag-Based Image Editing with Visual Reasoning
2026-10-09 09:58:10Armando Fortes, Tianyi Wei, Chindanai Trakantannarong, Shangchen Zhou, Xingang PanAbstract
Drag-based image editing provides an intuitive interface for spatially controlled image manipulation by allowing users to specify handle and target points. Existing methods have made substantial progress through optimization-based, one-step, and feed-forward formulations, but they often interpret drag instructions as geometric displacements. This limits their effectiveness when the desired edit depends on interpreting image content and inferring a plausible semantic transformation from sparse point constraints. We introduce ThinkDrag, a unified multimodal framework for drag-based image editing with visual reasoning. ThinkDrag is trained to associate point constraints with meaningful object- and scene-level transformations, and can optionally produce an explicit reasoning trace that interprets the intended edit before image generation. This reasoning trace improves interpretability, particularly for ambiguous drags. Drag Endpoint Markers, motivated by an analysis of cross-image attention, provide an explicit correspondence signal that grounds each drag in image space. To support this framework, we construct a supervised dataset of semantic drag transformations paired with reasoning traces and introduce DragBench++, a benchmark targeting challenging drag-based editing scenarios with reference edit solutions. Experiments show that ThinkDrag achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving generation quality and plausibility while maintaining competitive point-following precision.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13316
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Decoding Register Tokens Preserves Global Scene Details
2026-10-09 09:46:53David Jacob Drexlin, Julius Hense, Jonas DippelAbstract
Pretrained vision transformers learn structured image representations spanning spatial patch tokens and non-spatial tokens. Recent analyses suggest that non-spatial register tokens encode global scene properties such as illumination, blur, and style. Yet patch-based image decoders discard these outputs, leaving the decoder to recover image appearance from patches alone. We investigate whether retaining register features improves decoding when the complete spatial patch representation is already available. We study this question using representation autoencoders (RAEs) with frozen register-equipped encoders. Our decoder processes four register tokens together with all patch tokens through joint self-attention. Appearance probes, paired reconstruction-error analysis, and fixed-decoder register substitutions examine which global image properties are accessible from registers and how their values affect reconstructed pixels. For generation, we train a multi-head attention pooling (MHAP) predictor to recover register features from sampled patches, keeping the pretrained diffusion model and its samples unchanged. On ImageNet-1K, our ViT-B decoders achieve mean reconstruction FIDs of 0.472 with DINOv2 and 0.442 with DINOv3, reductions of 9.5% and 5.2% relative to their respective patch-only baselines. The corresponding PSNRs are 19.73 and 20.54 dB. For generation, our DINOv2 models achieve a mean FID of 1.641, 9.8% below the patch-only baseline on identical sampled patches.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13299
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QCLR: A Plug-in Robustification Module via Quantization for Contrastive Learning in Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Human Action Recognition
2026-10-09 09:30:15Nanzhu Chen, Feixiang He, Yunfeng Diao, Duygu Sarikaya, He WangAbstract
Skeleton-based human action recognition has gained increasing attention due to the stability of skeleton data across diverse environments and advances in motion capture technologies. Following the success of supervised learning approaches, self-supervised learning approaches, particularly contrastive learning ones, have achieved impressive performance. However, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose a plug-in robustification module via quantization for contrastive learning in self-supervised skeleton-based human action recognition (QCLR), which enhances the robustness of representations against adversarial attacks while preserving their representational capability. Specifically, we employ a dual-level quantization scheme across the encoding pipeline, which breaks the gradient propagation and absorbs small adversarial perturbations within the quantization bins. To mitigate the impact of inevitable quantization error, we further design an attention-guided multi-faceted quantization strategy to maintain the representation quality. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that integrating QCLR into a progressive lineage of mainstream contrastive learning models substantially improves robustness against both gradient-based white-box and gradient-free black-box adversarial attacks, while preserving highly competitive classification accuracy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13281
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CV-OPD: Contrastive Vision On-policy Distillation
2026-10-09 09:15:34Haowei Wang, Hao Lin, Qi Zhu, Jiayi Ji, Deyi Ji, Liujuan Cao, Rongrong JiAbstract
On-policy distillation (OPD) reveals versatility and convenience during VLM post-training, providing dense supervision for student from teacher. However, we observed an anomaly that the distilled VLM could still answer the questions accurately even when the related visual regions were masked or replaced with noise. Building on this observation, our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that OPD, which uses the answer as a hint, has failed to teach students to genuinely seek out and rely on visual evidence. Our theoretical analysis suggests that this failure arises from a shortcut enabled by the lack of visual constraints during distillation. To address the issue, we introduce Contrastive Vision On-policy Distillation (CV-OPD), which compares teacher distributions induced by positive and negative crops while conditioning on the same student prefix and augments optimization with a margin-based contrastive constraint, which is modulated with discrepancy gating across token and sample level. Specifically, CV-OPD first introduces a negative teacher unrelated to the answer and designs a Contrastive Divergence Loss (CDL) that constrains the feature distribution of student by contrasting the positive and negative teachers, correcting how the student exploits visual regions. The CV-OPD introduces a Discrepancy Aware Gate (DAG) that uses token-level and sample-level discrepancies to select visually relevant tokens for optimization, directing the student's attention toward visual content. Extensive experiments across a broad range of fine-grained visual benchmarks demonstrate that CV-OPD substantially alleviates shortcut and consistently improves the visual reasoning capabilities of existing VLMs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13264
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