Quantitative
-
Pre-training, Reasoning, Benchmarking: X-ray Report Generation on CheXpert Plus Dataset
2026-09-23 10:35:18Xiao Wang, Yuxiang Zhang, Dan Xu, Yuehang Li, Shiao Wang, Bo Jiang, Yaowei Wang, Yonghong Tian, Jin TangAbstract
X-ray image-based Radiology Report Generation (RRG) constitutes a critical research direction within medical artificial intelligence, with great potential to alleviate clinicians' diagnostic workload and shorten patient waiting periods. Despite substantial advances over recent years, the field faces evident bottlenecks stemming from insufficient standardized benchmarks and inadequate domain adaptation of generic large models. Notably, the newly released CheXpert Plus dataset is provided without accompanying baseline implementations and evaluation results, which impedes standardized training, quantitative evaluation and fair comparison among follow-up algorithms. To mitigate this limitation, we establish a comprehensive benchmark encompassing prevailing X-ray report generation models and Large Language Models on CheXpert Plus. This benchmark delivers a reliable comparative foundation for upcoming methods and enables researchers to rapidly identify state-of-the-art approaches within this domain. Beyond benchmark construction, we rethink X-ray RRG under the paradigm of large models and propose a novel framework termed MambaXray-PRB. Our framework improves report generation performance and enhances model interpretability via multi-stage large-model pre-training and multi-modal Chain-of-Thought reasoning. The pipeline consists of three successive phases: self-supervised auto-regressive modeling, X-ray-report contrastive learning, and post-training optimization for reasoning and report generation. Extensive experiments on IU X-ray, MIMIC-CXR, and CheXpert Plus datasets validate the effectiveness of MambaXray-PRB for radiology report generation. The source code of this paper is available on this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08813
PDF
-
InternW0: A Foundational Physical World Model for Efficient Real-World Interactions
2026-09-23 10:20:56Jisong Cai, Yao Mu, Ganlin Yang, Zhe Cao, Zhangzheng Tu, Xing Gao, Kailin Li, Xinyu Zhan, Lixin Yang, Yangkun Zhu, Haoxiang Ma, Ming Zhou, Qiaojun Yu, Yufei Xue, Liqun He, Yifei Yao, Yifan Zhu, Long Ling, Bingqi Jiang, Haoyu Guo, Xueyue Zhu, Bowen Zhou, Bin Zhao, Tianfan Xue, Chunhua Shen, Weinan ZhangAbstract
Physical intelligence requires more than predicting how the world may evolve: predictions must remain actionable as the world continues to change. We introduce InternW0, the first instantiation of the InternW physical world model series from Shanghai AI Laboratory, built around omnimodal interfaces, asynchronous multi-frequency processing, and local physical modeling under partial observations and external influences. InternW0 jointly learns future visual dynamics and continuous robot control through an asymmetric video--action architecture with flow matching. A high-capacity video expert provides longer-horizon predictive context, while a lightweight action expert operates at a faster timescale. Instead of regenerating the future for every action update, InternW0 reuses layerwise K/V and adapts it to newly observed states through observation-conditioned context routing. Domain-specific interfaces and soft prompts support heterogeneous embodiments, while contact-aware post-training incorporates force and tactile signals for contact-rich manipulation. We train InternW0 on approximately 7,200 hours of heterogeneous robot and egocentric data, including EgoLab, a 275-hour real-laboratory egocentric dataset. Evaluation spans simulation benchmarks and real-world scientific tasks, including a 15-stage metal--organic framework synthesis workflow and 5-stage contact- and force-aware dexterous manipulation for general-purpose quantitative pipetting. These results advance scalable, asynchronous, and science-native physical world models for universal and efficient real-world interactions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27656
PDF
-
ThaiTrees: Thai Syntactic Dependency Trees Across Domains
2026-09-23 08:45:19Attapol T. Rutherford, Papatchol ThientongAbstract
Studying syntactic patterns in naturally occurring language requires a large parsed corpus, but manual annotation is costly and difficult to scale. Thai has a manually annotated dependency treebank for training and evaluating parsers, but lacks a large automatically parsed corpus for quantitative syntactic research. We present ThaiTrees, a 342M-token corpus drawn from news, Wikipedia, spoken transcripts, and social media. We develop a reproducible pipeline for cleaning, processing, and parsing Thai text under the Universal Dependencies framework. The resulting corpus makes grammatical relations searchable and supports the study of syntactic distributions. We release a frequency lexicon and CoNLL-U parses in machine-readable formats suitable for both AI-assisted and conventional programmatic analysis.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27558
PDF
-
Hybrid Gaussians for Robust Open-Vocabulary 3D Segmentation with Multi-View Object Association and Boundary Refinement
2026-09-23 07:27:54Xueqi Qiu, Yueming Sun, Tianyu Zhang, Yuxuan Xia, Yang LongAbstract
Open-vocabulary 3D segmentation localizes objects from free-form text queries, but remains challenging in real image sequences: incomplete or noisy 2D supervision destabilizes multi-view identity assignment, while full-scene semantic learning weakens object-level discriminability. We introduce Hybrid Gaussians, a unified 3D representation jointly modeling object association and language-aligned semantics. Its Multi-View Object Association mechanism combines Observation Fusion and Semantic Contrastive Learning to improve identity consistency and semantic discrimination. Boundary Reconstruction Optimization further refines local boundary structure to improve contour quality. Experiments on LERF and 3D-OVS demonstrate strong quantitative and qualitative performance. Our method achieves 59.1\% mIoU on LERF, yielding a 13.4\% relative gain over the baseline. Project page: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27462
PDF
-
What Converges in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis? Structure over Geometry
2026-09-23 02:38:04Junwon You, Mihyun Jang, Sangwoo Mo, Jae-Hun JungAbstract
The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that increasingly capable models converge toward shared representations. Recent work narrows this claim to shared local neighborhood relationships, finding that capacity-dependent trends in several global similarity measures largely disappear after calibration. We challenge this interpretation by showing that prior local-global comparisons confound structural scale (local versus global) with what is compared: relational structure, defined by which samples are related, versus metric geometry, characterized by quantitative relations such as distances, similarities, or correlations. To disentangle these factors, we construct a controlled $2\times2$ framework that evaluates both relational structure and metric geometry at local and global scales. We introduce $H_0$ skeleton overlap as a global counterpart to mutual $k$-nearest neighbors, together with matched distance-aware variants. Across vision-language models, relational structure exhibits robust representational convergence at both scales after calibration, whereas increasingly stringent distance agreement substantially weakens alignment and progressively flattens the capacity-dependent trend. We further extend the analysis beyond ambient Euclidean geometry by evaluating distance agreement under a Riemannian metric approximation and recover the same structure-geometry pattern. The pattern is also reproduced in video-text representations. Together, these results show that relational convergence extends beyond local neighborhoods to global spanning structure, whereas metric geometry exhibits substantially weaker convergence.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27252
PDF
-
Diverse by Design: Architectural Constraints for Prototype-Based Interpretability
2026-09-23 00:58:05Xinmiao Lin, Matthew WrightAbstract
Prototype-based neural networks provide inherent interpretability through case-based reasoning, yet suffer from critical limitations: prototypes converge to redundant features, fail to capture diverse semantic parts, and lack quantitative interpretability assessment. We propose Diversity-Aware Prototype Learning (DAPL), which enforces prototype diversity through architectural constraints rather than explicit regularization. Our approach leverages multi-head self-attention with strict one-to-one attention-to-prototype mapping, ensuring each prototype specializes in distinct visual features. We further introduce foreground-aware training to focus prototypes on semantically meaningful regions and develop comprehensive evaluation metrics (Coverage and Diversity) for quantitative interpretability assessment. Experiments on CUB-200-2011 demonstrate substantial improvements: DAPL with foreground-aware training achieves 81.69\% accuracy with 0.596 Coverage and 0.427 Diversity, providing the best overall balance across all evaluated prototype-based methods. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27194
PDF
-
Self-Evolving Multimedia Verification through Memory Consolidation of Contestation Experiences
2026-09-23 00:18:36Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen, Vo Thanh Khang Nguyen, Hoang-Loc Cao, Phuc Ho, Truong Thinh Nguyen, Van Pham, Hung CaoAbstract
Multimedia verification requires not only accurate decisions but also traceable evidence, reliable human correction, and safe reuse of prior experience. Existing systems often lack explicit mechanisms for revising intermediate reasoning or preventing harmful knowledge transfer. We present SEMV (Self-Evolving Multimedia Verification), a self-evolving multi-agent framework that treats provenance-bearing arguments as the interface between evidence, reasoning, human contestation, and memory. SEMV combines arena-based quantitative bipolar argumentation (A-QBAF), causal and scoped revision, and verification-gated memory consolidation with explicit conflict retention. On COSMOS benchmark, SEMV achieves 91.88% accuracy versus 89.10% for the strongest comparable baseline. Verified memory reduces negative transfer from 5.7% to 0.2%. On CTR benchmark, constructed from reviewer contestations, scoped causal revision corrects 96.7% of initial errors while saving 52.8% compute. MV2026 Grand Challenge dataset further supports evidence-grounded, temporally consistent reporting. These results show that SEMV can evolve through verified experience while keeping accumulated knowledge and subsequent decisions traceable, revisable, and contestable.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27175
PDF
-
Propose, Don't Judge: An Anytime-Valid Referee for LLM Agents That Mine Investment Factors
2026-09-22 20:43:44Bo Qu, Mingguang Chen, Licheng WangAbstract
Language-model agents now run the whole of quantitative factor research: they propose investment factors, backtest them, select the survivors and retire them. We ask which of those jobs an agent should keep. Our answer is governed self-evolution: the agent may propose, and a frozen statistical referee that the agent cannot touch must judge. The referee scores each candidate only on market outcomes revealed after submission, by betting, so its false-discovery guarantee holds at every stopping time for any proposal policy. We cross three proposers (a script, a bandit and a language model) with this referee and with three deliberately leaky ones, in a synthetic world with planted truth, a probe-authoring environment and a ten-year walk-forward on the CSI 500. Who judges sets the number of false admissions: the frozen referee admits 5-11 times fewer sub-threshold factors than the leaky referees under a scripted proposer, and no proposer closes that gap. Who proposes sets the yield: the language model beats the script, matches the bandit, and adds the one capability a bandit lacks, writing its own diagnostic probes. The certificate's price is time: an admitted true factor waits about 500 trading days, and the certified portfolio's Sharpe ratio therefore trails an ungated one. Judging belongs to the procedure; proposing and instrument-making belong to the agent.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27051
PDF
-
Anatomy-Aware Synthesis of Post-Contrast Breast MRI from Pre-Contrast Images
2026-09-22 19:57:46Zhengbo Zhou, Dooman Arefan, Lin Gu, Ufara Zuwasti Curran, Shandong WuAbstract
We developed an anatomy-aware deep learning framework to synthesize post-contrast breast MRI from pre-contrast images, emphasizing tumor and background parenchymal enhancement (BPE) regions. This retrospective study included 649 patients with 6,251 paired pre-contrast and post-contrast images. The framework integrates breast mask consistency, lesion-region supervision, and BPE-region supervision into an image-to-image translation model. Evaluation included quantitative image quality metrics, a reader study with two breast radiologists, and downstream Ki-67 classification. The proposed method outperformed Pix2Pix, Pix2PixHD, diffusion-based synthesis, and mask-supervised baselines in whole-image and regional evaluations. Ki-67 classification showed no statistically significant performance differences across real- and synthetic-image training and testing settings, although this does not establish equivalence. These findings suggest that anatomy-aware supervision improves synthesis fidelity and support further investigation of synthetic post-contrast MRI for contrast-free imaging workflows.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27015
PDF
-
HYDRO: Towards Non-Reversible Face De-Identification Using a High-Fidelity Hybrid Diffusion and Target-Oriented Approach
2026-09-22 19:49:13Felix Rosberg, Vitomir \v{S}truc, Cristofer Englund, Eren Erdal Aksoy, Fernando Alonso-FernandezAbstract
Target-oriented face de-identification models aim to anonymize the identity of a target individual across different images or video frames, such that the target can no longer be reliably recognized, while maintaining key characteristics of the visual data. Such models commonly leverage generative encoder-decoder architectures to manipulate facial appearances, enabling them to produce realistic high-fidelity de-identification results, while ensuring considerable attribute-retention capabilities. However, target-oriented models also carry the risk of inadvertently preserving subtle identity cues, making them (potentially) reversible and susceptible to reconstruction attacks. To address this problem, we introduce in this paper a novel (robust) face de-identification approach, called HYDRO, that combines target-oriented models with a dedicated diffusion process specifically designed to destroy any imperceptible information that may allow learning to reverse the de-identification procedure. HYDRO first de-identifies the given face image, injects noise into the de-identification result to impede reconstruction, and then applies a diffusion-based recovery step to improve fidelity and minimize the impact of the noising process on the data characteristics. To further improve image fidelity and better retain gaze directions, a novel Eye Similarity Discriminator (ESD) is also introduced and incorporated it into the training of HYDRO. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on three diverse datasets demonstrate that HYDRO exhibits state-of-the-art (SOTA) fidelity and attribute-retention capabilities, while being the only target-oriented method resilient against reconstruction attacks. In comparison to multiple SOTA competitors, HYDRO reduces the success of reconstruction attacks by 85.7% on average.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27011
PDF
-
FleXray: Universal Clinical X-ray Segmentation
2026-09-22 17:37:55Victor Ion Butoi, Vivek Gopalakrishnan, John V. Guttag, Adrian V. Dalca, Neel DeyAbstract
X-ray is medicine's most widely used imaging modality, yet remains among its least quantitative. Unlike volumetric modalities like CT or MRI, X-ray collapses 3D anatomy into a 2D projection, causing structures to overlap and anatomical boundaries to be ambiguous, even to experts. As a result, labeling X-ray databases for training general-purpose segmentation systems is impractical, leaving morphometric and functional X-ray analysis confined to narrow anatomical regions and applications. To this end, we present FleXray, a generalist model for anatomical segmentation across the entire body in clinical X-rays. Instead of curating large, manually annotated X-ray datasets, we build a scalable, physics-based generative X-ray data engine. Using existing 3D whole-body CT segmentation datasets and generative image-editing models, we simulate fully-annotated 2D X-rays with diverse appearances, physiological properties, and imaging geometries. Trained on these simulations, FleXray accurately segments 60 anatomical structures across unseen research datasets and in-the-wild X-rays. We further show that FleXray makes X-rays directly amenable to quantitative analysis, enabling automated measurements for disease grading, robust navigation during X-ray-guided interventions, and data-efficient learning of pathological targets. We release the model, code, a full-body X-ray segmentation dataset, and a local, easy-to-use browser-based tool at this https URL .
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26756
PDF
-
Laryngeal Structure Segmentation in High-Speed Videoendoscopy Using Deep Learning
2026-09-22 16:09:40Sardar Nafis Bin Ali, Mohsen Zayernouri, Dimitar D. Deliyski, Maryam NaghibolhosseiniAbstract
Laryngeal high-speed videoendoscopy (HSV) offers an effective means of observing the motion of different laryngeal structures along with vibratory behaviors of the vocal folds under various voicing conditions. Segmentation of laryngeal tissues enables analysis of different tissue structures and their dynamics, helping characterize the involvement of laryngeal muscles in voice production. Given the large number of HSV frames, automating this task is imperative. While deep learning-based methods have been implemented in previous studies to segment laryngeal structures, they have not been applied to HSV data during connected speech, which poses significant challenges due to excessive tissue movements and image quality limitations associated with fiberoptic image acquisition. The application of deep learning to connected speech data is critical for capturing nonstationary laryngeal behaviors and identifying anomalous patterns associated with voice disorders. The present study aims to address these gaps by training U-Net models to detect the aryepiglottic folds and arytenoid cartilages, vocal folds, epiglottis, and glottal area, using HSV data from both sustained vowel phonation and connected speech obtained from normophonic and disordered voices. Image pre-processing techniques, including noise removal and histogram equalization, were applied to improve the quality of the training HSV images and enhance network performance. Finally, to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the networks, quantitative performance metrics were used alongside qualitative visual inspection of the test images. The high performance of the developed networks, with overall accuracies exceeding 95%, establishes their potential as reliable tools for automated laryngeal image analysis, quantitative characterization of laryngeal dynamics, and future detection of anomalous laryngeal behaviors in clinical settings.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26636
PDF
-
Radiomics-Conditioned Modulation of RenalCLIP Features for Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma Classification
2026-09-22 14:29:17Yuan Liang, Sourav Bhattacharjee, Abraham CampbellAbstract
Radiomics provides quantitative descriptions of tumour appearance that may complement disease-specific foundation models in small labelled cohorts. We investigate this complementarity for computed tomography-based classification of clear cell renal cell carcinoma. Our framework uses radiomics to modulate RenalCLIP features through feature-wise linear modulation (FiLM), while retaining a direct radiomics contribution. Internal testing and external validation compare it with conventional fusion strategies and reference classifiers. The FiLM model achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.804 internally and 0.854 externally, with the highest mean AUC among the evaluated RenalCLIP fusion strategies in both cohorts. Pathway ablations examine the contributions of conditional modulation and the direct radiomics residual, while feature permutation highlights the role of tumour texture. These findings support radiomics as a useful complement to RenalCLIP in a small labelled cohort and identify FiLM as an effective approach to integrating their representations for robust renal tumour classification.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26492
PDF
-
SsgCaps: A controlled dataset for the evaluation of sound scene generation algorithms
2026-09-22 14:26:14Modan Tailleur (LS2N), Junwon Lee (LS2N), Laurie M Heller (LS2N), Mathieu Lagrange (LS2N), Keunwoo Choi, Brian McFee, Keisuke Imoto, Yuki OkamotoAbstract
Sound Scene Generation is about the automatic synthesis of artificial sound scenes. We introduce SsgCaps, a publicly available dataset of human-engineered sound scenes wherein each scene matches a precisely structured prompt that guides the sampling process. The corresponding prompts are sampled from a predefined action-based typology that allows extensive sampling while retaining plausibility. SsgCaps is a sound scene dataset derived from the unpublished reference dataset for Task 7 of the 2024 DCASE Challenge edition, which contained private-and public-domain audio samples. In contrast, SsgCaps contains only public-domain audio samples, allowing us to open this dataset to the community. To make this dataset useful to the community, we first elaborate on the rationale for the prompt and dataset structure. We then perform a comparative quantitative analysis of the 2 versions of the dataset. To do so, we compare both versions to the audio synthesized by the SSG algorithms submitted to the challenge using Fr{é}chet Audio Distance (FAD) and Kernel Audio Distance (KAD) as well as perceptual ratings. This analysis shows only small differences, which enables us to recommend the open version for further benchmarking of SSG algorithms.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26854
PDF
-
SAMI3D-DW: Interactive Segmentation of Any 3D Medical Images
2026-09-22 06:25:11Ping Gong, Shiyuan Su, Fandong Zhang, Xinchen Han, Haowei Sun, Yiming Li, Yizhou YuAbstract
Interactive segmentation of 3D medical images supports quantitative analysis of anatomical structures and disease while allowing users to specify and refine their targets. Despite substantial progress by nnInteractive and VISTA3D, reliable segmentation across diverse clinical targets remains challenging, particularly for complex anatomical structures and the heterogeneous, long-tailed spectrum of pathology. We present SAMI3D-DW V1 (hereafter SAMI3D-DW), an interactive 3D segmentation model trained on Deepwise's large-scale proprietary medical image datasets. We evaluate the model under simulated user interactions on a CT/MR benchmark comprising 4,326 cases from 219 source datasets, spanning 107 anatomical and pathological categories, organized by a medical taxonomy and evaluated with a category-balanced DSC score. SAMI3D-DW achieves the highest category-macro Dice among evaluated methods in both interaction modes. With one point, it scores 0.5764 versus 0.5315 for nnInteractive, the strongest baseline, rising to 0.7771 versus 0.7494 with five points. With bounding-box initialization, the scores are 0.7130 versus 0.6530. After five corrective clicks, SAMI3D-DW reaches 0.8002 versus 0.7868, making it the only evaluated box-compatible model to exceed 0.80. For radiologists and clinicians, SAMI3D-DW enables segmentation of complex anatomical structures, including intracranial vessel trees on CT and MR angiography, with a few clicks. In a preliminary in-house comparison involving neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), SAMI3D-DW-assisted tumor annotation took minutes per case and approximately one-fifteenth of the time required for manual annotation, highlighting its potential to support volumetric treatment-response assessment.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25743
PDF
-
PhyVisGen: Physically and Visually High-Fidelity Robotic Manipulation Data Generation
2026-09-22 04:03:34Yu Zheng, Qiyu Feng, Yixin Wu, Baoquan Yang, Yixuan Zhou, Bingyang Hu, Kemeng Huang, Guansheng Yang, Hesheng WangAbstract
Large-scale manipulation demonstrations are essential for learning robust visuomotor policies, yet real-world data collection is expensive and difficult to scale. Simulation offers a promising alternative, but physical and visual discrepancies can limit the transferability of synthetic data, particularly for manipulation with soft grippers. We present PhyVisGen, a physically and visually high-fidelity framework for scalable robotic manipulation data generation. On the physical side, PhyVisGen introduces an arm-gripper coupling method based on the Incremental Potential Contact (IPC), enabling high-fidelity soft contact throughout complete manipulation trajectories. On the visual side, it combines real-scene reconstruction with real-time path tracing to generate visually realistic observations while preserving captured scene appearance. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate the physical and visual fidelity of PhyVisGen. Policies trained exclusively on synthetic manipulation demonstrations achieve 65-95% success across five real-robot tasks, without real-robot demonstration data or policy fine-tuning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25653
PDF
-
Directional Total Variation-Regularized Implicit Neural Representations for Continuous Super-Resolution in Degraded Imaging Domains
2026-09-21 21:30:17Mahmoud Saeedi KelishamiAbstract
In this paper, we introduce the Directional Total Variation-Regularized Implicit Neural Representation (DTV-INR), an advanced variational paradigm that synergistically integrates coordinate-driven implicit neural networks with an anisotropic, structure-tensor-informed total variation regularizer tailored for resolution-agnostic image super-resolution. Casting the continuous-to-discrete acquisition process into an ill-posed inverse problem framework, our formulation equips a SIREN-architected coordinate network with a dynamic Riemannian metric tensor field D(x). By leveraging its spectral decomposition, the proposed regularizer preferentially directs diffusion parallel to dominant structural contours while penalizing cross-edge dissipation, successfully circumventing the classical staircasing artifacts inherent to scalar total variation schemes. We rigorously prove the well-posedness of this formulation in H^1(Omega) by establishing the existence, uniqueness, and metric stability of the variational minimizer, and realize this via an alternating projected optimization algorithm that decouples network parameter tuning from adaptive tensor field updates. Comprehensive experiments conducted on clinical brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and biomedical transmission electron microscopy confirm substantial quantitative and qualitative improvements, yielding PSNR enhancements reaching +5.05 dB over baseline unregularized INRs and +1.71-2.85 dB over isotropic TV-INR across continuous (non-integer) upsampling factors, alongside remarkable noise robustness up to sigma_eta = 0.10 and monotonic preconditioned convergence behavior.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25429
PDF
-
Sex Estimation from Footwear Outsole Impressions Using CNN Transfer Learning and Interpretable Image Statistics
2026-09-21 20:29:28Jinyi Niu, Ziyi Song, Weining ShenAbstract
Footwear outsole impressions are a common form of forensic pattern evidence, yet quantitative methods for estimating wearer attributes from these images remain relatively underdeveloped. We investigate binary sex estimation from footwear outsole impressions by comparing convolutional neural network (CNN) transfer learning with traditional feature-based classification. Using a publicly available outsole-impression dataset, we adopt a shoe-level training and test partition that keeps replicate scans of the same physical shoe together to reduce data leakage. We evaluate pretrained CNNs through end-to-end fine-tuning, frozen feature extraction followed by support vector machine classification, and hybrid feature fusion incorporating handcrafted, geometric, and metadata-derived descriptors. Fine-tuned CNNs achieve the strongest overall predictive performance and substantially outperform traditional classifiers trained on the manually specified descriptors alone, while frozen-feature approaches offer a less computationally demanding alternative. Exploratory analysis of low-dimensional CNN representations reveals associations with frequency threshold ratio, image contrast, and wavelet-based summaries, providing a connection between learned representations and measurable properties of outsole impressions. These findings suggest that CNN transfer learning captures discriminative information beyond the descriptors considered and offers a promising approach to footwear-based forensic screening. Further validation on independently collected and casework-like impressions is needed before operational use.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25386
PDF
-
ZVeC: A Zero-Shot Framework for Instance-Level Vehicle Extraction and Generative Point Cloud Completion
2026-09-21 16:13:21Daisy Li, Kyle Gao, Quanyun Wu, Boris Jutzi, John S. Zelek, Jonathan LiAbstract
LiDAR point clouds acquired in underground environments exhibit severe geometric incompleteness due to occlusions and limited sensor viewpoints, making reliable point cloud completion challenging without large supervised datasets. We propose ZVeC, a zero-shot, instance-driven framework that reformulates scene-level completion as compositional object-level reconstruction. By decomposing a scene into semantic object instances, ZVeC reduces reconstruction ambiguity in cluttered environments while eliminating the need for scenario-specific training. Each segmented vehicle is completed independently using a depth- and 3D Gaussian-conditioned diffusion model that exploits generalized geometric priors before the reconstructed instances are recomposed into the original scene. To evaluate our approach, we construct a real-world dense LiDAR benchmark of underground parking environments. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements over representative scene-level baselines in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The completed point cloud differs substantially from the measured input (average KL divergence ~ 2.1), yet reducing the input to only 1% of the original LiDAR measurements changes the completed reconstruction only marginally (KL divergence < 0.50). This demonstrates that ZVeC produces geometrically consistent completions even under extreme input sparsity.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24825
PDF
-
Uranus: Building the Next-Generation Simulation Infrastructure for Embodied AI
2026-09-21 16:06:16Wenkang Qin, Yukun Zhou, Noah Shen, Jisong Cai, Dongxiao Mao, Baicheng Li, Yue Zhang, Wei SuiAbstract
Scalable simulation is essential for robot data generation, policy training, evaluation, and safe iteration, yet real-world interaction is costly and conventional simulators require labor-intensive construction. We present Uranus, a data-driven robot simulator built around a joint-trajectory-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model. Uranus offers three key capabilities: (1) streaming, open-ended rollout, which receives future joint-position trajectories online and autoregressively generates one latent frame per step, corresponding to four RGB frames, without a fixed horizon; (2) low-latency generation, achieving 24 FPS after inference optimization; and (3) scalable, extensible robot control, providing a unified interface for synchronized multi-view generation across diverse robot embodiments and camera configurations. We conduct comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data, providing an objective assessment of Uranus and clearly identifying its current limitations. We release the code and model weights to empower the community with practical tools and insights.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24815
PDF
