Detection
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A Multi-Source Ultrasound Benchmark Revealing the Limits of Contemporary Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection Methods
2026-10-07 08:39:51Marco Riedenauer, Daniel Kienzle, Pratik Mayekar, Rainer LienhartAbstract
Self-supervised anomaly detection is a promising paradigm for medical ultrasound, as normal images are often easier to obtain than exhaustive annotations of all possible pathologies. However, most existing evaluations are limited to a single anatomy or task, making it unclear whether models learn a robust notion of normal ultrasound appearance or only a source-specific representation. We introduce the SADUSI benchmark, a multi-source ultrasound dataset designed to train and evaluate anomaly detection methods across a broad range of anatomical regions, views, and acquisition protocols. The goal of SADUSI is to provide a diverse normal ultrasound distribution and a benchmark for visible structural anomalies that can be assessed from single images. We evaluate representative self-supervised anomaly detection methods and find that current approaches struggle in this setting. In particular, reconstruction-based diffusion methods such as AnoDDPM and DeCo-Diff achieve pixel-level AUROC values of 0.56-0.72 and maximum F1 scores of 0.10-0.26, indicating limited separation of pathology from normal image regions. Feature-based PatchCore variants perform better, reaching pixel-level AUROC values of 0.76-0.83, but remain limited with maximum F1 scores of 0.14-0.40. These findings suggest that broad multi-source ultrasound anomaly detection remains an open challenge and that SADUSI can serve as a resource for developing methods that generalize beyond anatomy-specific settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09677
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Quasi-Binarized Autoencoders: An Architecture-Independent Information Bottleneck for Medical Image Anomaly Detection
2026-10-07 08:34:40Shouhei Hanaoka, Takahiro Nakao, Atsushi Takamatsu, Takeharu Yoshikawa, Osamu AbeAbstract
Unsupervised anomaly detection, which learns only from normal images, is a central task in medical image analysis and remains an open problem. Reconstruction-based methods pass an image through an encoder-decoder network trained on normal data and detect anomalies from the residual between the image and its reconstruction. This works only if the information passed from the encoder to the decoder is limited; otherwise the network learns an identity mapping and reconstructs anomalies too. This limit is usually imposed through architectural choices, tuned per dataset, that cannot be stated in bits. We introduce the quasi-binarizing (QB) layer, which squashes each latent element into [0, 1] and adds Laplace noise of scale 1/epsilon. Each element is then epsilon-locally differentially private, and the mutual information between an image and its reconstruction is bounded by a quantity that depends only on epsilon and the number of QB elements, whatever the encoder and decoder. Placing a QB layer on every encoder-decoder path, including all skip connections, we build QBAE, a seven-level attention U-Net with 32,768 QB elements. On the seven datasets of the MedIAnomaly benchmark, QBAE with one architecture and one configuration reaches a mean image-level AUROC of 0.828, the highest among methods that do not adapt to each dataset, and the best reported results on BraTS2021 (AUROC 0.911, pixel-level AP 0.838). The noise is kept at test time, so that every reconstruction satisfies the bound. Without input corruption, the bottleneck alone prevents identity collapse (mean AUROC 0.805 vs. 0.590). Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09670
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Tracing Inputs, Verifying Outputs: Validating Attribution in Music Generation
2026-10-07 08:14:19Taejun Kim, Wonil Kim, Jongmin Jung, Hyeongseok Wi, Sangeun Kum, Keunhyoung Luke Kim, Taehyoung Kim, Dongjoo Moon, Seungsoon Park, Taewan Kim, Virginie Berger, Juhan Nam, Jongpil LeeAbstract
How can we verify whose music contributed to an AI-generated output? This paper demonstrates how input-based attribution can provide verifiable evidence of which audio sources were used in a generation and whether they shaped the output. To do so, we condition the generation solely on audio without any text input, then trace the inputs behind each output, and establish their musical effect. In prompt adherence tests and controlled input swaps, the stems generated by our generator, MixAudio, follow the prompt audio in timbre and the context audio in harmony. Yet these outputs may still reproduce training data not supplied as inputs. We therefore audit memorization with our musical version identification model, musicDNA, and find few reproductions outside the input records. On human-judged cases within the flagged pool, it achieves higher precision and recall than the other tested memorization detectors. The two evaluations suggest that input records and output analysis provide complementary evidence for attribution, on which rights-holder reporting and compensation can draw as the AI music economy takes shape. Audio examples are available at this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09637
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Identity-Duplication Auditing in National-Scale Neuroimaging Repositories
2026-10-07 07:57:11Jiheng Li (HABS-HD), Michael E. Kim (HABS-HD), Trent M. Schwartz (HABS-HD), Yuhan Cui (HABS-HD), Gaurav Rudravaram (HABS-HD), Derek B. Archer (HABS-HD), Timothy J. Hohman (HABS-HD), Lori L. Beason-Held (HABS-HD), Victoria L. Morgan (HABS-HD), Dario J. Englot (HABS-HD), Angela L. Jefferson (HABS-HD), for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (HABS-HD), for the BIOCARD Study team (HABS-HD), for the Health (HABS-HD), Aging Brain Study (HABS-HD), (HABS-HD), Health Disparities (HABS-HD), Study Team, Lianrui Zuo, Guray Erus, Christos Davatzikos, Bennett A. LandmanAbstract
National-scale magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) repositories increasingly integrate data from different studies and institutions. However, subject identifiers that are valid only within individual datasets are no longer guaranteed to remain globally unique after aggregation, making it possible for the same subject to be assigned multiple identifiers, which we define as identity duplication. Such duplication can create leakage between training and test data and inflate apparent performance in downstream biomedical studies. Existing methods do not provide an end-to-end, image-based workflow for auditing this problem at repository scale. In this work, we present HAPPEN, a human-in-the-loop pipeline for auditing identity duplication in T1-weighted brain MRI repositories. It combines SHA-256 fingerprinting for exact-duplicate detection with supervised contrastive retrieval of non-identical scans that may originate from the same person. Retrieved pairs are reviewed as candidates in a locally hosted interface rather than automatically classified as duplicates. We deployed the workflow in a 95,129-scan aggregated repository and assessed end-to-end recovery using 54 genetic-reference pairs. Transferability was assessed by locally deploying the same workflow on 22,386 scans at an independent institution without model retraining or image transfer. Deployment in the study repository identified 1,316 exact-duplicate scan groups and 1,275 reviewer-supported near-duplicate subject groups. Of these groups, 56% and 82%, respectively, crossed dataset boundaries. All 54 genetic-reference pairs were recovered. The external team independently completed the full workflow using a locally selected operating threshold and review standard.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09614
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STORK: Spatio-Temporal Observation of uterine contRactions via neural networKs
2026-10-07 07:44:07Melissa Schween, Tristan Gottwald, Jordina Aviles Verdera, Lisa Story, Mary Rutherford, Jana HutterAbstract
Uterine contractions in fetal MRI are typically identified manually and discarded, limiting insights into contraction dynamics. We formalize Uterine Contractile Activity Detection (UCAD) as a weakly-supervised learning problem and introduce STORK, a multi-instance learning model trained on dynamic MRI series using only coarse, series-level labels. STORK factorizes 3D spatio-temporal convolutions into parallel branches across temporal hyperplanes to capture coherent tissue motion without the cost of full 4D convolutions. Per-frame embeddings, combining intensity and Demons-estimated displacement fields, are aggregated by a linear mean-pooling head. This ensures that frame-level contraction scores can be recovered post-hoc without frame-level training supervision. Evaluated on around 700 multi-vendor dynamic fetal MRI series, STORK achieves a series-level AUROC of 95.0% and AUPRC of 94.6%, substantially outperforming 3D ResNet and ConvNeXt baselines. Grad-CAM analysis suggests that the model draws on predictive features extending beyond the placenta into the uterine tissue, offering an automated tool for richer phenotyping of uterine behavior.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09598
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Constitution-Guided Watermarking
2026-10-07 06:50:47Toluwani Aremu, Samuele Poppi, Nils LukasAbstract
Watermarking enables language model providers to identify text generated by their models. However, its desired properties can conflict (\ie~stronger watermark signals can degrade text quality), while designs that resist editing may also facilitate forgery. Providers address these trade-offs by choosing configurations that balance competing objectives or prioritize particular properties. Either approach imposes a shared operating point on requests with different requirements, potentially sacrificing quality where wording preservation matters or robustness where reliable attribution is essential. To allow flexible and adaptable designs, we introduce \emph{Constitution-Guided Watermarking}, a framework that selects request-appropriate trade-offs from provider requirements, listed as natural-language principles. \emph{Offline}, a pretrained reasoning agent examines constitutional rules alongside watermark implementations and iteratively refines rule-specific configurations using empirical feedback. \emph{At deployment}, a separate monitor identifies applicable rules and retrieves the corresponding policy, including watermarking exemptions, without modifying the serving model. Furthermore, our framework supports offline parallel optimization and refinement of rule-specific configurations based on evolving provider requirements without affecting deployment, and binds each deployed configuration to its evaluation evidence, making deployment decisions auditable. In a proof-of-concept evaluation using KGW and a five-rule constitution, our framework selects configurations responsive to provider priorities and improves post-paraphrase detection on robustness-prioritized requests by up to $14$ percentage points over fixed configurations, while matching or exceeding all baselines in aggregate quality and clean detection at a nominal $0.1\%$ false-positive rate.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09552
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WAPR: A Foundation Model for Wide-Angle Refinement in Unseen Object Pose Estimation
2026-10-07 06:38:15Yulin Wang, Mengting Hu, Hongli Li, Jianghao Zhou, Chen LuoAbstract
Real-world applications require 6D pose estimation to be accurate, fast, and scalable to unseen objects. This paper introduces WAPR, a zero-shot wide-angle pose refinement model that refines candidate poses with rotational deviations up to 90 degrees. With as few as 12 candidate poses per detected object instance, WAPR supports fast inference within 1 s per frame and reaches a pose-estimation throughput of up to 25 detected object instances per second. To support wide-angle training for rotationally symmetric objects, WAPR uses rotational symmetry priors to canonicalize symmetry-equivalent pose targets before loss computation. We further construct SA6D, a large-scale 6D training dataset with such priors. SA6D obtains KASAL-assisted rotational symmetry priors for 944 GSO scans and expands them through geometry and texture augmentation into about 50K augmented object instances and about 2M rendered RGB-D images. In addition, an angle-balanced loss stabilizes learning across different angular ranges by reducing the influence of uninformative large-error cases. Experiments on seven BOP core datasets show that WAPR achieves state-of-the-art performance in unseen-object 6D pose localization and detection under both fast and unconstrained inference settings. Project page: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09535
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LiG-DETR: Local-in-Global Reassembly in Latent Space for Aerial Object Detection
2026-10-07 06:07:37Yupeng Zhang, Fangzhuo Gao, Juntao Cheng, Ziyi Zhao, Liang Wan, Ruize HanAbstract
Aerial object detection faces substantial scale and density variations. Small objects are easily degraded by downsampling and feature compression, while medium and large objects require sufficient global context. Existing methods mainly follow two paradigms: image slicing provides clearer local evidence but relies on independent crop-level prediction and post-processing, whereas feature- and query-level optimization preserves unified inference but operates on already compressed full-image representations, limiting recovery of fine-grained information. This raises a key question: can aerial detection directly acquire high-fidelity local evidence before feature degradation and integrate it into a unified end-to-end framework? To this end, we propose LiG-DETR, an Efficient Global-Local Reassembly framework that reformulates image slicing as high-fidelity local feature acquisition. A shared encoder extracts global and locally magnified features, which are projected into the detector feature space. The projected local features are reassembled according to their original spatial locations to form a globally aligned local feature level, and a single DETR decoder jointly decodes global and local features. To reduce redundant computation, Context-Preserved Selective Reassembly focuses high-resolution encoding on informative regions while preserving a dense feature layout, and Density-Aware Adaptive Query Allocation adapts the decoder query budget using encoder proposal scores. Experiments show substantial gains on small and medium objects while retaining strong large-object performance, with favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-offs and improved cross-domain generalization. The code will be released.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09511
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RT-DETR-World: Transferring Rich LLM Semantics to Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Detection
2026-10-07 06:01:35Yupeng Zhang, Ziyi Zhao, Juntao Cheng, Sheng Wang, Ningnan Guo, Ruize Han, Liang WanAbstract
Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) recognizes categories unseen during training through textual category queries, yet achieving strong generalization with real-time efficiency remains challenging. Beyond vocabulary scaling, zero-shot generalization may benefit from reusable visual--semantic cues learned from seen data, including attributes, actions, states, and contextual relations. Existing real-time OVD methods primarily emphasize vocabulary coverage and efficient region/query--text matching; under strict efficiency constraints, compact detectors may struggle to absorb rich instance semantics and scene context. We propose RT-DETR-World, a compact DETR-style detector that transfers the rich semantics conveyed by descriptions during training while retaining lightweight query--text matching at inference. We construct GroundingCapv2 with three levels of supervision: category names for standard OVD, object descriptions conveying instance-level semantics, and image descriptions conveying object relations and scene context. These descriptions serve only as training-time semantic supervision. To help the compact detector absorb these semantics, we propose Dual-Path Description Alignment (DDA), combining a deployment-consistent MiniLM pathway with a training-only LLM teacher. MiniLM provides query--category supervision and object-description alignment, while offline teacher features supervise matched queries and global visual representations at the object and image levels, respectively. All teacher features are precomputed, and the teacher-side modules are removed after training. We further propose Relation-Aware Negative Relaxation (RNR), which uses teacher-derived semantic similarities to relax related negatives while preserving exact positives. Experiments demonstrate competitive zero-shot accuracy and a favorable accuracy--efficiency trade-off. The code will be released.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09502
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SpatialUQ: Post-Hoc Uncertainty Quantification from Spatial Consistency in Black-Box Vision Models
2026-10-07 05:53:08Md Kawsher Mahbub, Milon Biswas, Mirza Niaz Morshed, Wei YuAbstract
Clinical vision models are often deployed as frozen black boxes with no access to internals, retraining, or ground truth at inference time. We introduce \textbf{SpatialUQ}, a post-hoc uncertainty method using only output probabilities. It measures the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the global prediction and the mean of five fixed spatial crops in six deterministic forward passes. The premise is simple, trustworthy predictions are spatially consistent. On NIH ChestX-ray14 (DenseNet-121, $N{=}25{,}596$), our Multicrop Uncertainty Score (MUS) reaches $0.784$ failure-detection AUC versus $0.664$ for MC-Dropout ($p{<}10^{-6}$) at one-fifth the compute, with native calibration ($\text{SCE}{=}0.049$ vs.\ $0.127$ for $\ell_1$), the best-calibrated among methods above 0.78 AUC. A supervised fusion of MUS with entropy, confidence, and $\ell_1$ reaches $0.832$, outperforming a five-member ensemble ($0.813$). MUS scales with model quality, reaching $0.899$ with BiomedCLIP ($\rho = 0.846$), while this relationship remains meaningful in-distribution ($\rho = 0.523$) but breaks down under severe distribution shift (VinBigData, $\rho = 0.027$). MUS is well-suited to diffuse findings but is less dependable for small focal lesions such as nodules. Code and experimental materials are publicly available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09498
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BanglaRhet: Benchmarking Classical and Transformer Models for Rhetorical and Persuasion Detection in Bangla Political Speech
2026-10-07 05:22:19Rohit Kumar Sen, Anik ChowdhuryAbstract
Political discourse often uses rhetorical and persuasive language to frame narratives, influence public opinion, and mobilize audiences. While Bangla natural language processing has made progress in sentiment analysis and opinion mining, systematic benchmarking of transformer models for fine-grained rhetorical and persuasion technique detection in Bangla political speech remains largely underexplored. This paper presents a benchmark study of transformer-based models for detecting rhetorical form and persuasive intent in Bangla political discourse. Using BanglaRhet, a manually annotated corpus of 30,289 Bangla political speech segments collected from publicly available political news sources, we formulate two supervised single-label classification tasks: rhetorical technique detection (contrast, repetition, exaggeration, metaphor, rhetorical questions) and persuasion technique detection (blame assignment, call to action, unity call, moral, emotional, and logical appeals). We evaluate four transformer-based models, BanglaBERT, BanglaBERT-Base, SahajBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa-Base, against classical TF-IDF baselines. BanglaBERT achieves the highest performance, with 65.40% macro-F1 for rhetorical technique detection and 66.46% for persuasion technique detection, outperforming the best tuned classical baseline by 19.2 and 13.8 macro-F1 points, respectively. Class-level analysis indicates that errors are mainly associated with semantic overlap among labels, figurative language, and class imbalance. The results provide initial benchmark baselines for Bangla rhetorical and persuasion-aware political discourse analysis and highlight the need for context-aware and multi-label modeling.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09464
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TMT: Runtime Backdoor Detection for Vision-Language-Action Policies on Unseen Tasks
2026-10-07 05:20:16Zirun Zhou, Jingfeng Zhang, HaoChuan Xu, Xizhe Zhang, Elliott Wen, Jing Sun, Hong JiaAbstract
Backdoored vision-language-action (VLA) policies can preserve benign task performance while producing malicious actions when a trigger appears. Detecting such activation is difficult because malicious behavior can comprise individually plausible actions, while unfamiliar tasks introduce legitimate changes in observations and behavior. We introduce TMT, a runtime backdoor detector based on Token Manifold and latent Transition modeling. Trained on benign rollouts, its two branches assess input-token structure and prediction errors in adjacent-layer latent dynamics. A suspicious rollout identified by the token manifold branch, once confirmed through latent deviations, guides transition selection for subsequent monitoring. We further explore policy purification through self-distillation: a frozen copy of the backdoored policy provides benign-input actions to supervise a student on paired benign and triggered observations, without requiring a separate clean reference policy. For evaluation, we adapt traditional backdoor detectors and repurpose anomaly and failure detection methods as VLA backdoor detectors. In a post-hoc comparison with ten baselines, TMT achieves state-of-the-art backdoor detection performance on unseen tasks across three VLA backdoor attacks. Our project page is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09462
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trACT: temporal revelation Airborne Camera Trap
2026-10-07 04:20:47Oliver Bimber, Rakesh John Amala Arokia Nathan, Mohamed Youssef, Vinayak Lal Bhatnagar, Ralf Berger, Klaus Hackl\"anderAbstract
Effective remote monitoring and surveillance using drones are frequently impeded by severe environmental and thermal clutter, dynamic vegetation, target camouflage, and system latency. Drawing inspiration from the hunting strategies of birds of prey that hover and stabilize their vision to isolate subtle ground motion, we introduce trACT (temporal revelation Airborne Camera Trap), a lightweight, real-time aerial robotics framework designed for autonomous consumer drones. The system integrates Temporal Max Pooling (TMP), a low-level signal processing method that transforms imperceptible movement across a rolling integration window into robust value and time encodings, with self-supervised motion anomaly detection to isolate target motion from background environmental motion caused by wind gusts and drone drift. To overcome mechanical and processing delays, trACT combines motion prediction with automated gimbal-stabilized optical zoom verification and equitable multi-target verification balancing. Extensive real-world field experiments in densely forested wildlife habitats and surveillance scenarios demonstrate that trACT successfully bridges the gap between wide-area aerial monitoring and precise, autonomous target verification under challenging operational conditions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09417
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WSM-Aware HRI: An IoT-Enhanced Framework for Early Detection and Norm-Guided Repair of Failures with LLM Guidance
2026-10-07 03:20:59Hanlin Zhang, Yuquan Wang, Tianwei Zhang, Zhenglong SunAbstract
Human-robot interaction (HRI) failures remain a major barrier to deploying robots in real-world environments. Prior work often treats failures as isolated technical faults or focuses on post-hoc recovery behaviors. In practice, many breakdowns arise because humans and robots operate under inconsistent assumptions about the current world state. We propose WSM-Aware HRI, an IoT-enhanced modular framework that unifies diverse HRI breakdowns as World-State Mismatches (WSMs) between a human's instruction-implied assumptions and a robot's grounded world model built from multimodal perception and digital augmentation. A Large Language Model (LLM) is used to make implicit assumptions explicit, map them to a small set of mismatch types, and specify the evidence needed for verification against the robot's world state. WSM-Aware HRI shifts failure handling from execution-time recovery to proactive mismatch detection during intention formation, enabling interventions guided by safety, norm compliance, and multi-user coordination with transparent explanations. We evaluate mismatch identification in ten everyday cases spanning both visual and latent-state mismatches. The system can accurately produce the expected output results, and ablations show that reliable identification depends on appropriate grounding representations and verification-oriented refinement. These results indicate that treating interaction breakdowns as explicit world-state mismatches enables earlier detection of impending failures and offers a principled mechanism for integrating external evidence and social constraints into human-robot interaction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32336
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Multimodal LLMs Can Learn to Read Brain Signals: A Vision--Language Model for Unified Multi-Task EEG Decoding
2026-10-07 03:13:03Parastoo Azizeddin, Omid Sharafi, Maryam M. ShanechiAbstract
Learning EEG representations that generalize across cognitive tasks, subjects, and recording conditions remains a key challenge in electroencephalography (EEG) decoding. Recent advances in foundation models have improved EEG decoding performance, yet a fundamental open question remains: how to effectively interface neural signals with these models to enable multi-task learning across datasets. To investigate this question, we introduce BraVista, a visual-language framework that encodes multichannel EEG signals as structured images and enables multi-task learning through instruction-conditioned vision-language models (VLMs). Our approach relies on continued post-training of a general-domain VLM, leveraging its visual and linguistic priors to adapt to neural signals without a separate large-scale EEG-specific pretraining stage. We evaluate BraVista on four datasets spanning sleep staging, emotion recognition, cognitive workload classification, and abnormal EEG detection, showing strong performance across these tasks. Further analyses show that the choice of EEG-to-image representation is critical to performance. Moreover, through controlled perturbations of the EEG signal, we observe a gradual performance degradation under increasing noise, suggesting that the model relies on EEG-relevant information rather than superficial visual patterns. Together, these findings establish structured visual representations as an effective and scalable interface between neural signals and general-domain foundation models for unified multi-task EEG decoding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09355
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GRC-Net: Global Representation Consistency Network for Unsupervised Multimodal Anomaly Detection
2026-10-07 02:35:46Seyoung Jeong, Jong Pil Yun, Sang Jun LeeAbstract
Automated quality inspection is essential for ensuring product reliability in this http URL image-based methods effectively capture appearance-related defects, these methods are limited in detecting structural and geometric anomalies, motivating multimodal approaches incorporating 3D information. However, existing methods mainly rely on local patch-level representations, which often lead to unstable reconstruction errors even in normal regions. To address this limitation, we propose GRC-Net, which integrates a global-attention MLP to enforce global representation consistency across patch embeddings with a stable reconstruction module to improve reconstruction stability. The proposed method captures holistic contextual information through a global token and suppresses reconstruction noise by minimizing discrepancies between original and predicted embeddings. Experiments on MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies demonstrate that GRC-Net consistently outperforms existing methods at both image and pixel levels. Qualitative results further demonstrate reduced reconstruction errors in normal regions and more distinct reconstruction differences between normal and anomalous regions.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09329
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SEA-LM: Egocentric Spatial Audio Understanding for Wearable Microphone Arrays
2026-10-07 02:08:22Sonal Kumar, Sinan Hersek, Artem Dementyev, Mengzhen Pan, Ishan Chatterjee, Anurag Kumar, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Andrea ColacoAbstract
Embodied, ego-centric intelligence fundamentally requires the ability to comprehend spatial audio within complex environments. While large audio-language models excel at mono-channel reasoning, they lack spatial awareness, discarding critical spatial cues that enable sound localization and that can improve the disentanglement of overlapping sound sources. To address this, we present SEA-LM, a Spatial Audio Understanding model. First, we introduce FOACODER, a layout-flexible spatial audio encoder trained on source localization and ego-centric voice activity detection objectives to encode First Order Ambisonics derived from variable-count, variable-position smart-glasses arrays via beamforming. We train a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to understand these spatial audio embeddings through a two-stage curriculum spanning six tasks, including sound localization and spatially selective transcription in settings with multiple speakers and overlapping sounds. To prevent the transcription outputs from dominating the next token prediction loss and overwhelming the direction predictions, we introduce a Spatio-temporal Weighted Cross-Entropy Loss. On our evaluation set, SEA-LM achieves lower azimuth and elevation MAE, higher temporal IoU, lower external-source hallucination and missing-source rates, and lower WER on most transcription tasks than compared baselines, while remaining robust across 1,211 smart-glasses array configurations with 4 to 9 microphones.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05610
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LeCuration: A Tiny World Model as a Data Curation Multi-Tool
2026-10-07 01:41:23Mayank Sengupta, Nirmit Desai, Eric Song, Kunal SawarkarAbstract
Many applications of physical AI run within finite or closed physical worlds with a limited set of physical laws governing object behavior. Examples include robots working in a warehouse and agents moving around in a video game. In order to better organize, filter, and curate data for physical AI applications, we propose a new approach centered on the unique settings and physical laws of individual datasets. We train LeCuration, a small world model intended to serve as a data curation tool for a separate, larger downstream model. To build this model, we choose LeWorldModel (LeWM)as our latent encoder and predictor, adding a diffusion transformer (DiT) decoder to add visuals to autoregressive gameplay rollout. We find that the embeddings of this model can be used as an anomaly detection signal and as a content-based clustering heuristic, and that auto-regressively predicting the game state with this model allows us to qualitatively check for action-state consistency. This paper presents a qualitative, proof-of-concept case study on CS:GO gameplay data; we do not yet report quantitative curation metrics or downstream training results, which we identify as the key next step.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09285
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Multi-Objective Aligned Small Language Model Framework for SUD Patient Dialogue Generation
2026-10-06 23:10:21Thushara Manjari Naduvilakandy, Hyeju Jang, Mohammad Al HasanAbstract
Substance Use Disorder (SUD) counseling requires patient responses that reflect underlying cognitive states such as beliefs, coping strategies, and readiness for change. Although large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, they often fail to produce cognitively coherent and clinically realistic patient behavior, especially under ethical and data-scarce clinical settings. Moreover, deploying frontier-scale LLMs in healthcare applications presents practical challenges including high computational cost, latency, privacy concerns, and limited deployability in resource-constrained environments, motivating the need for cognitively aligned small language models (SLMs). We propose a cognitively grounded framework for SUD patient dialogue generation that explicitly models and aligns latent cognitive components with patient histories and counselor questions. Our pipeline consists of two stages: cognitive component detection and cognitive component-aligned dialogue generation. To enable effective learning with smaller models, we combine knowledge distillation from high-capacity teacher models, preference optimization from human-annotations, and attention-guided reward shaping. Extensive evaluations using automatic scores like BERTScore, ROUGE, METEOR and BLEU, and LLM-as-judge hit-metrics against both human and teacher-model references show that cognitively informed fine-tuning substantially improves cognitive realization and alignment over a generic instruction-tuned baselines and mental health domain specific SLMs, with particularly strong gains for open-ended cognitive components.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09209
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R-CNN-Based Chess Position Recognition
2026-10-06 22:42:22Paras Govind, Ognjen Arandjelovi\'cAbstract
Performing chess game position recognition solely from a single image of a three-dimensional board requires predicting the position and orientation of the board relative to the camera, the occupancy of squares and the piece type, which includes its colour. We propose an R-CNN-based framework with independent components for piece recognition and board geometry estimation, whose predictions are combined to reconstruct the position. For piece recognition, we adapt Faster R-CNN using a class-weighted objective and a deeper classification head. The detector operates directly on the input image, retaining alternative piece hypotheses that are subsequently refined using constraints on piece counts and square occupancy. For board detection, we introduce an octagonal arrangement of eight labelled boundary keypoints, predicted using the keypoint head of Mask R-CNN. These provide redundant correspondences for homography estimation and encode board orientation. The estimated homography maps representative points from the piece boxes to an 8x8 grid. On a synthetic dataset, the modifications to piece detection increase mean average precision from 61.59% to 90.14%. Of the predicted board keypoints, 97.11% are within 1% of the image diagonal of their labelled targets. Using ground-truth piece boxes with the predicted homographies gives correct square assignments for every test position. The complete framework recovers 76.61% of test positions exactly and 96.49% with at most one incorrect square.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09191
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