Sparse attention mechanisms, which score all token pairs but propagate only the strongest, now underpin the most efficient Transformers for lightweight image super-resolution. This paper observes that sparsification changes what it means to improve such a network. A dense attention layer has one place where representation quality matters: the aggregation of attended features. A sparse layer has two, because the top-k operator first decides which tokens survive and only then decides what to do with them, and a token discarded at the selection stage cannot be recovered downstream. Selection quality and aggregation quality are therefore separable targets, addressed by modules placed before and after the attention respectively. We test this by pairing a dual-branch spatial enhancement on the input of a progressive focused attention with a wavelet-domain modulation on its output, forming SFMformer. Measuring each module alone and jointly over all fifteen benchmark-scale pairs, we find their gains are not additive: the joint gain exceeds the sum of the individual gains on nine pairs, and the sign of the discrepancy is predicted by how much the weaker module contributes on its own (r = -0.72), so the two compound when they relieve different constraints and overlap when they relieve the same one. Enabling spectral modulation once per block rather than once per layer retains the effect at roughly one-sixth of its cost, keeping the model below one million parameters at every scale. SFMformer ranks first on 28 of 30 PSNR/SSIM entries across five benchmarks and three upscaling factors. We report the cases where the pairing does not help, and deploy the model on a Raspberry Pi 5 to confirm the design is practical under tight resource budgets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17966
Appendicitis is one of the most common abdominal emergencies worldwide and requires prompt diagnosis and treatment to prevent life-threatening conditions. However, accurately differentiating complicated cases, such as perforation or abscess formation, from uncomplicated appendicitis remains a significant clinical challenge. Among other methods, ultrasound is a safer and more cost-efficient diagnostic technique because of the lack of radiation exposure. In this research, an advanced system capable of automatically detecting complicated appendicitis from ultrasound images was developed. A dataset consisting of 4679 ultrasound images with 5 classes, namely perforated, abscess, acute, appendicolith, and normal, was used for the proposed model training and testing. Four pretrained deep learning models, DenseNet201, InceptionV3, ConvNextTiny, and VGG19, have been employed for detecting and classifying complicated appendicitis. In the initial configuration, InceptionV3 achieved the second highest accuracy, with a value of 69.21%. Owing to suboptimal performance with raw images, further optimization techniques, including image preprocessing, hyperparameter tuning, model fine-tuning, and image sharpening, were applied. These enhancements significantly improved the model's performance, with an accuracy of 95.58% for InceptionV3. The model performance is then explained with gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM), which creates a heatmap of the regions responsible for the model's prediction of the infected areas. This could make crosschecking with experts much easier.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17923
The continuously deformable geometry of modular robots makes it difficult to define a fixed representation for reconfiguration planning and analysis. This letter introduces a square-cell abstraction that maps deformable rhombus modules to fixed-size grid cells while retaining physically interpretable local motions through two primitives, pivoting and shearing. Under this abstraction, we prove that every non-straight edge-connected configuration with $N \geq 7$ can be transformed to a fixed canonical staircase using only admissible primitive motions. Since these motions are reversible, any two configurations in this class are mutually reconfigurable. The proof is constructive and directly yields a staircase-canonicalization planner that transports removable boundary modules while preserving connectivity. As a practical enhancement, we further introduce a boundary-to-delivery lookahead selector that ranks admissible high level choices without affecting the completeness guarantee. Experiments demonstrate the constructive reconfiguration process and show that the selector substantially reduces planning time, while reference comparisons indicate lower planning times than the prior framework over the shared module counts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17324
Inference-time quality-enhancement methods are an effective and widely adopted means of improving diffusion models without expensive retraining. We study a family of training-free techniques conceptually rooted in Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), most of which were originally proposed on older U-Net diffusion models and validated using metrics that assess image quality in isolation, without accounting for compositional alignment or semantic correspondence between the generated image and its associated text prompt. We re-evaluate eight such methods on two open-weight rectified-flow transformers under a fixed per-model protocol and three compositional-alignment benchmarks. No method consistently improves on CFG across the measured criteria. APG obtains several nominal best scores, but the corresponding gains often remain within the estimated evaluation uncertainty. Attention-perturbation methods provide isolated gains on SD3.5 Medium and more frequent degradations on FLUX.2 [klein] 4B Base, while CFG remains a competitive lower-cost baseline.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16786
RAW video restoration is fundamental to high-quality low-level perception and serves as the basis for a wide range of downstream vision applications. While binary neural networks (BNNs) enable efficient lightweight deployment for image enhancement, their deficiencies in modeling temporal coherence and activation value distributions hinder their effectiveness when applied to video scenarios. In this paper, we propose BinRVR, a binarized RAW video restoration framework that reduces computation and parameters by approximately 96% while incurring only about 4% performance degradation. Specifically, we present a Binarized Information Interaction Module (BIIM) to jointly model spatial and temporal information in an efficient and unified manner. Moreover, we develop a Distribution-Aware Binarized Convolution (DAB-Conv) that leverages the statistics of full-precision activations to mitigate quantization errors. The proposed framework further supports multi-bit quantization, enabling flexible accuracy-efficiency trade-offs across different hardware constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our BinRVR achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art binarized methods on RAW video restoration tasks, including low-light enhancement, denoising, deblurring, and super-resolution. We further explore the potential of our method on downstream video applications, including object detection and monocular depth estimation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16756
Binaural speech enhancement for hearing aids aims to reduce noise while preserving the interaural cues needed for spatial localization. Although deep neural network-based methods achieve strong noise reduction, they often distort the rela- tionship between the left and right signals. In this paper, we propose two novel binaural cue preservation losses. First, a binaural reconstruction error loss that directly penalizes masking-induced distortion in the relationship between the left and right spectra, providing a more direct measure of the binaural consistency than conventional separate interaural level differences (ILD) and interaural phase differences (IPD) errors as in prior work. Second, a binaural cue loss that jointly models ILD and IPD to better preserve the binaural structure. Experimental results show that both proposed losses maintain strong noise reduction performance and reduce masking- induced distortion compared to the state-of-the-art baseline cue loss, while the second proposed joint binaural cue loss also outperforms the baseline in ILD preservation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16299
Identity-preserving video generation (IPVG) requires synthesizing videos that are faithful to both reference subjects and text prompts. Existing methods are often hindered by high tuning costs or limited input-level enhancements, struggling to maintain rigid identity consistency during complex, long-sequence actions. To address these limitations, we propose KeyID, a training-free IPVG framework that decouples the synthesis of video dynamics from the injection of identity. Specifically, KeyID comprises two components: (1) Reference-Aware Video Generation, which produces an identity-agnostic video draft aligned with multiple references, and (2) Identity-Preserved Keyframe Editing, which integrates the target identity via sparse keyframe correction and subsequent motion interpolation. By shifting from dense frame-level supervision to sparse keyframe-level refinement, KeyID effectively resolves the capacity conflict between prompt adherence and identity fidelity. Crucially, our modular design allows seamless extension to multi-subject references and complex sequential action generation without additional training. KeyID outperforms prior works and is validated by automatic and human evaluations on the official challenge benchmark, ultimately securing the runner-up position in the Track 2 (Sequential Action) of the ACM Multimedia 2026 IPVG Grand Challenge. Source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16154
Retrosynthesis is a cornerstone of drug discovery and organic synthesis. While data-driven deep learning models have shown remarkable progress, they autonomously learn reaction patterns from extensive datasets with limited integration of established chemical knowledge as priors. To address this limitation, we introduce RetroMPA, a molecular property-aware, post-hoc enhancement module that injects chemical knowledge into the retrosynthesis pipeline. Rather than functioning as an independent SMILES sequence generator, RetroMPA is a broadly applicable, model-agnostic chemical filter designed to recalibrate and optimize the predictive pathways of existing algorithms. This plug-and-play framework integrates seamlessly with a range of data-driven retrosynthesis methods, enhancing outputs without modifying model architecture or requiring resource-intensive retraining. By leveraging a property-aware latent embedding space, RetroMPA consistently improves top-1 accuracy across eight representative retrosynthesis models by an average of 5.50% on USPTO-50K. Furthermore, we validate its scalability on the large-scale USPTO-Full dataset, achieving an average improvement of about 2.03% across both template-based and template-free architectures. Wet-lab experiments provide preliminary support for the practical utility of the framework. These syntheses confirmed viable, previously unreported substrate combinations for classic reaction paradigms---specifically, Suzuki-Miyaura coupling, Bucherer reaction, and Friedel-Crafts acylation---suggesting that RetroMPA can operate beyond mere data fitting. The code is open-sourced at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16111
Automated pavement-distress detection is commonly framed as a small-object problem, motivating high-resolution P2/4 detection heads and lossless downsampling. We present YOLO26-RD, an end-to-end (NMS-free) detector built on YOLO26 with two lightweight novel modules (LearnableContrast, a 494-parameter differentiable analogue of CLAHE that adapts contrast per tile inside the network, and EdgeSPD, a Sobel-gated space-to-depth downsampler adding only 2 parameters over SPD-Conv), and we subject the design to a data-first audit on a 7,618-image road-survey dataset (alligator crack, linear crack, patching). The audit falsifies the small-object premise: 92% of instances are COCO-large, and linear cracks are extreme-aspect structures (median 10:1) whose difficulty is sensitivity, not localization. Guided by this analysis, we remove the P2 detection level while retaining P2 features in the fusion path, which improves mAP50 by 2.8 points over the full YOLO26-RD model and reduces epoch time by 8%. Trained from scratch at 640x640, our best screening configuration reaches 0.787 mAP50 on the validation split versus a 0.771 project baseline (a stock YOLO26-s of uncontrolled recipe), with the largest per-class gain on the rarest class (patching, 2.6 points over baseline; 9.4 over the unmodified YOLO26-RD control under an identical recipe). A failure-mode decomposition further attributes the residual error of the bottleneck class (crack, approximately 0.74 across all architectures tested) to train/validation distribution shift on crack orientation and length, sub-pixel crack width at 640x640, and label incompleteness, factors no architecture change can address. We argue that for pavement imagery, measurement-driven subtraction outperforms module accretion, and we release our audit protocol alongside the model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15713
Maintaining global geometric consistency is a central challenge in long-sequence 3D reconstruction, with scale drift being the most critical failure mode. In chunk-based inference pipelines, the scale degree of freedom in sequential Sim(3) alignment is left unconstrained, causing estimation errors to compound multiplicatively and distort global trajectories and point cloud geometry. We present a scale-consistency enhancement framework built on a key insight: in structured environments such as driving scenes, geometric quantities arising from environmental regularity remain inherently invariant across temporal segments, and discrepancies in their per-chunk measurements directly expose inter-chunk scale drift. We propose Scene Geometric Invariant Anchoring (SGIA), which extracts dominant geometric invariants from each chunk's predicted point cloud via coarse-to-fine robust estimation and exploits their cross-chunk consistency to establish scale constraints independent of point cloud registration, explicitly degenerating 7-DoF Sim(3) alignment into 6-DoF rigid-body transformation and severing chain-wise scale error propagation at its source. We further introduce a lightweight test-time adaptation strategy that fine-tunes only normalization-layer parameters via multi-objective self-supervision, progressively improving intra-chunk predictions along the sequence. Both modules are plug-and-play and require no offline retraining. Experiments on multiple long-sequence benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, reducing absolute trajectory error by up to 32% with significant gains in trajectory stability and reconstruction quality. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15260
Teams that adopt cycle-consistent adversarial networks for unpaired image-to-image translation meet the same obstacles: adversarial training oscillates or collapses, cycle consistency preserves coarse layout while finer texture drifts, and a single discriminator judging global realism misses local artifacts. Four enhancements address these failures, and they are usually compared on output quality alone. We show that they also divide sharply by where their cost falls, and that this division, which follows from the architecture and not from any particular run, yields an adoption order for teams under a compute or latency budget. A Wasserstein objective with gradient penalty, a VGG19 perceptual loss on the cycle reconstruction, and multi-scale discriminators change training only, so a team can adopt or drop them without altering what ships. Self-attention alone persists into the deployed generator, with memory growing as the square of the feature-map size, which makes it the one component a resource-constrained team should defer. We integrate all four onto a lightly tuned baseline for horse-to-zebra translation, introduced one at a time on a fixed control and then combined, and for each we give the failure mode it targets and how it integrates. We document the collapse and reconstruction-artifact modes the baseline produced, report what visual inspection of saved samples showed for each variant, and report Fréchet Inception Distance and Kernel Inception Distance for the combined model. We specify the protocol still needed, covering the individual variants, perceptual similarity, and downstream segmentation, to rank these enhancements on measured evidence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14811
Large low-Earth-orbit (LEO) Earth-observation (EO) constellations offer frequent access to geographically dispersed ground targets, but emergency requests may arrive after committed routine-plan execution has begun. The resulting dynamic emergency observation scheduling problem (DEOSP) requires urgent tasks to be inserted under intermittent ground contact without excessive routine-plan disruption. To address DEOSP, we propose a task-driven three-layer distributed scheduling (T3L-DS) method, which represents task demand and sensor footprints on a common geographic grid and forms temporary clusters from observation capabilities and current inter-satellite links. For intra-cluster coordination, T3L-DS introduces onboard dual-plan bidding and joint marginal evaluation. It also designs an inter-cluster coordination mechanism for unresolved demand. Extensive computational experiments compare T3L-DS with centralised simulated annealing (SA), an adapted selective time-variant better reply process (A-SeTVBRP), and a conventional contract-net protocol (CNP). T3L-DS achieves the highest emergency coverage among the distributed methods, with average relative improvements of approximately 2.8% and 17.1% over A-SeTVBRP and CNP, respectively. Its average relative gap from SA is approximately 7.1%. Under conflict-enhanced loads, it reduces routine-coverage loss by approximately 57.9% and 87.7% relative to A-SeTVBRP and CNP, respectively. The ablation study confirms the contribution of the proposed coordination enhancements. Overall, the results show that T3L-DS provides an effective distributed approach to DEOSP.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14789
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with early detection improving survival from <20\% to >70\%. The standardized LI-RADS criteria establish a biopsy-free, fully imaging-based framework that can serve as a foundation for automating HCC diagnosis with artificial intelligence (AI). However, the lack of large, publicly available datasets with high-quality labels has limited the development of AI models for LI-RADS characterization. We introduce the \textbf{AMPLIFAI} dataset, the first public dataset of multiphase abdominal CT scans annotated with LI-RADS categories and segmented for three major LI-RADS features: arterial phase hyperenhancement, washout, and enhancing capsule. Following the \emph{Datasheets for Datasets} format, this paper details the dataset's composition, curation process, and annotation pipeline to facilitate transparent, reproducible research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14778
Generating realistic, controllable, and temporally coherent urban environments is a critical yet unresolved challenge in the autonomous driving community. In this paper, we introduce InfiniVerse, a unified pipeline for long-range, 2D-3D-aligned, and controllable synthesis of dynamic urban scenes from a single frame. In practice, our approach first reconstructs a 3D occupancy representation from the input multi-view frame. This representation serves as a foundation for autoregressive scene extension along arbitrary trajectories. Subsequently, a video diffusion model translates the coarse occupancy grid into realistic, spatiotemporally consistent video sequences. Moreover, we propose a hierarchical sketch-and-refine paradigm, in which the generated videos are re-projected as image-conditioned feedback to enhance the 3D occupancy representation, establishing cross-modal alignment and mutual enhancement between the visual and spatial domains. Extensive evaluations on the Waymo Open Dataset and nuScenes demonstrate that InfiniVerse achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a FID of 6.4 and FVD of 67.97, significantly outperforming existing benchmarks in both duration and stability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31109
Audio-visual zooming on mobile devices is fundamentally constrained by limited microphone count, compute resource, unknown array geometry, and weak assumptions on real-world acoustic conditions. We present RDSE: Real-Time Directional Speech Enhancement Framework, a hybrid pipeline that combines traditional signal processing and modern machine learning methods for dual-microphone low-end smartphones. Unlike tightly coupled AV systems that continuously use visual feeds or embeddings, RDSE decouples visual interaction from feature inference, using camera input solely to parameterize the steering vector for spatial filtering. The proposed system uses four modules: dereverberation network, a beamformer with a temporal convolutional network, and a MetricGAN based denoiser. Extensive evaluation on benchmark data and real-world recordings demonstrates effective zooming without precise geometry calibration. Comparative experiments show competitive performance to existing methods. Proposed system is rigorously tested for statistical validity, ablation study, latency profiling, and practicality through real-time live-streaming.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12476
This paper integrates end-to-end Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models with agentic tool-use to propose Agentic Robot with Tool-use (ART). ART is a tool-injection framework that tunes any VLA model to leverage off-the-shelf tool modules for low-level vision, high-level affordance, and embodiment enhancement. Compared to vanilla VLA models with a whole continuous action solution space, ART reduces the complexity of the action solution space through tool-use, which not only improves generalizability across different tasks but also reduces data dependency. To demonstrate the advantages (high generalizability and low data dependency) of this framework, we first built a dataset of 30K tool-use trajectories and action demonstrations, which is much smaller than those used by baseline methods. We then designed a training regimen for long-trajectory tool-use reasoning in challenging environments. Experiments show that ART achieves a 20% higher success rate than mainstream baselines on simulation and real-world tasks, such as pick-and-place in the dark at novel viewpoints. Empirical results highlight the benefits of an agent-based approach: modular tool utilization enables more efficient training, lightweight deployment, and scalable integration of new tools. This design fosters robustness, adaptability, and extensibility, paving the way for the practical deployment of VLA systems in complex real-world scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14047
Recent foundation model-based methods have endowed RGB images with strong zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) through vision-language pretraining. However, RGB observations alone remain limited in perceiving anomalies dominated by geometric deformation, depth variation, or subtle surface changes. Auxiliary modalities can provide complementary structural information, but existing multimodal methods typically fuse them directly into a shared semantic space, which may disturb the text-aligned anomaly semantics established by RGB foundation models and often requires modality-specific architectures. To address this issue, we propose a plug-and-play auxiliary-conditioned enhancement framework for zero-shot anomaly detection. Instead of reconstructing a joint multimodal anomaly semantic space, our framework preserves the original RGB image-text anomaly matching pathway and uses auxiliary observations as conditional signals for RGB feature refinement, allowing auxiliary modalities to seamlessly enhance existing RGB-based zero-shot anomaly detectors. Specifically, a lightweight meta-learning module takes global RGB and auxiliary representations as input and generates sample-adaptive low-rank residual updates to determine how RGB features should be refined. We further construct uncertainty-aware spatial modulation from the initial RGB anomaly response and auxiliary reliability, which determines where local residual updates are strengthened or suppressed. This global-to-local conditional modulation enables selective multimodal enhancement while preserving the original RGB anomaly semantics. Extensive experiments on MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies demonstrate that our framework consistently improves multiple popular RGB-based zero-shot anomaly detectors, achieving state-of-the-art performance for multimodal zero-shot anomaly detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13973
Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging suffers from limited spatial resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio, which can compromise quantitative accuracy and lesion detectability. Deep learning-based denoising methods have demonstrated strong potential for improving PET image quality. However, their practical deployment in real-world settings remains challenging, often requiring multiple specialized models and expert interventions, such as identifying motion-induced misregistration artifacts, estimating noise levels to select an appropriate denoiser, and performing lesion-focused quantitative assessment after denoising. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) for image quality understanding and large language models (LLMs) for contextual reasoning provide new opportunities for automated, decision-driven workflows. Inspired by expert workflows for PET image quality enhancement, we propose an VLM- and LLM-driven multi-agent PET denoising framework that dynamically assesses image quality and lesion status, autonomously selects optimal denoising models and parameters, and enables closed-loop feedback with rollback mechanisms. Experiments were conducted on Siemens Biograph Vision Quadra PET/CT data with 1/20 and 1/50 low-dose settings. Individual module evaluations demonstrated the reliability of the agentic components, while the complete framework achieved higher PSNR and SSIM than UNet, GAN, and DDPM baselines at both dose levels. These preliminary results demonstrate the feasibility of using a closed-loop multi-agent framework to adapt PET denoising strategies to different image conditions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13791
Clinical intelligence requires estimating a patient's underlying condition from incomplete observations rather than learning isolated mappings from scans to answers. Volumetric medical images provide dense observations of anatomy, attenuation, and lesions, whereas clinical language provides sparse but complementary semantic observations. We formulate CT-centered intelligence as inference over a shared latent patient state, under which readout, reconstruction, and simulation all become state-dependent prediction problems. To operationalize this view, we introduce HounsBench, a computed tomography (CT) centric patient-state benchmark that unifies these three task families with patient-disjoint splits and per-family metrics, and HounsWorld, a 3B multimodal world model that treats volumetric scans and language as observations of the shared state through Joint Understanding-Generation Learning. A shared transformer forms an implicit patient-state estimate and supports three outputs: query-conditioned answers that read out the state, reports and captions that reconstruct it in language, and condition-specific CT volumes for low-dose denoising, virtual contrast enhancement, and anatomy-constrained text-and-mask-to-volume generation. Zero-initialized CT adapters preserve pretrained multimodal mappings, while condition-explicit Hounsfield-unit window sampling exposes clinically meaningful density observations. HounsWorld shows strong performance across all three task families while consistently improving CT understanding through clinically structured completion. Our project is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12904
Mechanistic interpretability of large language models lacks spatially resolved, falsifiable tools for testing whether internal components are specialized for distinct cognitive operations. We adapt subtraction analysis, the standard framework of human neuroimaging, from biological brains to perturbed transformers, and apply the same logic to both substrates in parallel. Building on the Brain-LLM Unified Model (BLUM), which showed that layer-perturbed LLaVA-1.6-Vicuna-13B error profiles match the lesion patterns of aphasic patients, we develop PRISM (Perturbation-based Regional Interpretability through Subtraction Mapping). PRISM maps the seven clinical Philadelphia Naming Test categories, subtracts error classes pairwise, and treats each perturbation seed as a subject in a group analysis with threshold-free cluster enhancement along the layer axis. We run a structurally matched analysis on 213 chronic post-stroke aphasia patients using correlation-difference lesion-symptom mapping, and replicate both sides on held-out splits. The designs match in subject dimension (seeds, patients), spatial dimension (layers, atlas-parcellated cortex) and thresholding, but the contrast operator differs: a within-subject error-proportion difference for the LLM, a between-subject correlation difference for the cortex. Both substrates recover a robust phonemic-favoring dissociation, a deep layer cluster and a frontal-perisylvian cortical cluster, both replicating; the semantic-favoring direction is a consistently signed but non-significant trend on both. PRISM thus gives a falsifiable, spatially resolved test of functional-specialization claims in transformer language models. A confirmatory ROI-level intervention (PRISM Stage 3) licensing the strongest causal-mechanism claim is left to subsequent work.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12717