Vietnamese pre-trained encoders have improved rapidly, but the strongest ones are large, multilingual-vocabulary models or depend on external word segmentation, which makes them costly to deploy. We present GoiBERT, a family of two compact Vietnamese encoders with 26M and 49M parameters that operate directly on raw text. GoiBERT learns from two complementary teachers. A same-tokenizer Vietnamese encoder first teaches general-purpose representations. A much larger teacher then provides task-level guidance through soft labels that are generated without ever labeling its own training data. Across eight benchmarks covering text classification, aspect-based sentiment analysis, natural language inference, and named entity recognition, GoiBERT-large achieves the highest average score among non-teacher models. It does so with fewer than half the parameters of the strongest compact baseline and twice its throughput. GoiBERT-base retains 99% of that baseline's performance at a quarter of its size. Our analysis shows that compression is nearly lossless for sentiment and classification tasks but remains costly for inference and entity recognition, which points to clear directions for future work. Our code and models are available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30067
Reliable uncertainty estimation is important across visual recognition tasks, providing information about the confidence and reliability of model predictions. Many uncertainty estimation methods obtain predictive diversity through mechanisms that can suppress intermediate features, perturb the input, or require substantial additional computation. Stochastic activation functions, where network units randomly select between multiple nonlinearities during a forward pass, have previously been used to improve optimization behavior, mitigate limitations of fixed ReLU activations, and increase output diversity. In this work, we reframe stochastic activation switching as a lightweight mechanism for uncertainty estimation. The proposed method samples between nonlinear activation functions, inducing predictive diversity while keeping intermediate feature pathways active. This enables uncertainty estimation from a single trained model without the training cost of ensembles, task-specific uncertainty heads, or architectural redesign. We evaluate the proposed approach across classification, semantic segmentation, and out-of-distribution detection using convolutional and transformer-based architectures on diverse datasets. Across these settings, stochastic activation switching improves uncertainty quality while preserving competitive primary-task performance, showing that stochastic nonlinearities provide an effective and information-preserving source of predictive variation for visual recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29875
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies need to recognize gaps in their training knowledge to request useful demonstrations or assistance in new situations, especially when failures are costly. Disagreement within an ensemble of independently trained policies can guide these decisions, but requires training and running multiple policies. We propose post-hoc kernel-variance heads that estimate epistemic uncertainty from the embeddings of a single policy. Each head computes the conditional variance of a Gaussian process conditioned on embeddings from the training demonstrations. Fitting requires no regression targets or gradient updates and leaves the policy unchanged. In experiments with SmolVLA on LIBERO-10, the kernel variance heads perform competitively with two-policy ensemble scores in task-level correlation with task success, in demonstration acquisition during active learning, and in referral to a stronger supervisor policy as a proxy for human assistance. For SmolVLA, the head on the vision-language backbone reduces uncertainty-scoring time by up to approximately a factor of 50 compared with ensemble scores, while also substantially reducing setup costs. We also show that the established evaluation protocol on LIBERO-10 primarily rewards recognition of coverage differences between tasks, while execution variability weakens assessment of within-task rankings. Thus, controlled perturbations provide a complementary evaluation: modality-specific heads identify unfamiliar camera, instruction, or state inputs, while fused heads can detect unfamiliar combinations of individually familiar inputs. With a supervisor proxy trained on the evaluated perturbation families, the decoder head improves within-task referral over ensemble disagreement. These findings show that useful uncertainty estimates for adaptive robot learning can be obtained from a single policy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29730
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient inference through sparse, event-driven computation, yet remain constrained on continuous, context-dependent tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). A key bottleneck is the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron, whose membrane decay erases information across pauses and phonetic boundaries while it must both extract features and retain long-range context. Inspired by cortical separation of nonlinear filtering and somatic integration, we introduce the Spiking Ternary GRU (stGRU): a ternary-weight gated recurrent unit performs temporal filtering, while downstream Resonate-and-Fire (RF) neurons generate the binary spike stream driving the next block's event pathway. This makes binary event transmission a native training constraint rather than a separate deployment-time activation quantization step; together with ternary weights, learned projections avoid dense floating-point matrix MACs. Trained end-to-end on LibriSpeech-960, Small, Medium, and Large stGRUs reach 8.09%, 7.04%, and $6.44 \pm 0.17\%$ WER on test-clean without an external language model. To our knowledge, these are the first matrix-MAC-free spiking networks without a learned ANN sequence decoder to achieve single-digit WER on LibriSpeech. The architecture also achieves 10.88% test CER on Aishell-1 (9.28% on dev) when trained from scratch. Internally, trained networks develop a depth-graded hierarchy: shallow layers act as fast acoustic filters, while deep layers form slower semantic integrators whose latent representations segregate into part-of-speech manifolds and word-level spike events. Deep-layer firing rates follow lognormal distributions with a sparsity gradient, mirroring hierarchical processing observed in human cortex in vivo. Our biologically grounded architecture combines competitive ASR with favorable modeled compute and memory cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29720
Iris recognition systems are vulnerable to presentation attacks (PAs), including textured contact lenses, print replays, and synthetic irises. Existing PAD methods rely on supervised learning with attack data, limiting generalization to unseen attacks and new sensors. We propose Diff-IrisPAD, an unsupervised framework based on Brownian Bridge Diffusion that models bona fide iris distributions without using attack samples. The method reconstructs clean iris textures from degraded inputs and detects attacks via reconstruction inconsistency using ViT scoring and pixel-level measures. Experiments on a large-scale multi-sensor dataset (125K+ images, NIR and VIS, 8 attack types) show that Diff-IrisPAD achieves an overall ACER of 30.52, significantly outperforming diffusion-based baselines while demonstrating strong generalization to unseen attacks. These results highlight the effectiveness of diffusion-based bona fide modeling for robust and scalable iris PAD.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29611
Automatic phenotype information extraction plays an important role in rare disease diagnosis, genotype-phenotype analysis, and precision medicine. However, accurately identifying phenotype concepts and determining their associations with specific patients remain challenging, particularly in full-text biomedical articles involving multiple patients and complex clinical descriptions. This paper presents an overview of CHIP 2026 Shared Task 1, which aims to promote the development of methods for patient-specific phenotype concept recognition from full-text biomedical literature. The task consists of two subtasks: full-text phenotype concept recognition and patient-specific phenotype association. For this evaluation, we used 200 annotated full-text biomedical articles from the PatientPheX dataset, containing 506 patients, 15,193 phenotype mentions, and 5,656 patient-phenotype associations. A total of 455 teams registered for the competition, with 189 and 103 valid submissions received on the Phase A and Phase B leaderboards, respectively. The best-performing system achieved an overall score of 0.7389 on the final test set, outperforming the baseline by 8.37 percentage points. The top-performing teams explored diverse approaches combining biomedical language models, large language models (LLMs), and ensemble strategies. The evaluation results highlight both the potential of these approaches and the remaining challenges in patient attribution and phenotype normalization from full-text biomedical literature. The post-evaluation phase remains open at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29606
Biometric recognition often degrades under partial facial vis- ibility, where conventional facial cues are occluded. The forehead region remains consistently visible and contains distinctive crease patterns that can serve as a complementary biometric trait. We present a unified eval- uation of forehead-crease recognition across explainable zero-shot rea- soning, domain-adaptive learning, and trait-specific modeling. FIRE en- ables interpretable zero-shot verification using multimodal large language models, while pretrained face-recognition models are adapted to the fore- head domain through margin-based learning. Under open-set evaluation, the best zero-shot model GPT-4o+FIRE achieves 18.22% EER, while Edge-Forehead achieves 8.30% EER and 54.01% TMR@0.1% FMR. The results show that although MLLMs offer interpretable zero-shot verifi- cation, trait-specific learning remains more effective for robust forehead- crease biometric recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29495
This paper proposes a refinement to existing vision-based portable pipelines for the recognition of graspable object parts. Such pipelines can effectively support automatic grasp selection and preshaping in upper-limb prosthetic devices. However, realistic scenarios in which multiple objects are present still represent a challenge. The proposed method exploits a minor modification to the conventional hardware setup and a custom training approach to extend the applicability of vision-based pipelines. A laser pointer is introduced in the setup as an effective mechanism for object disambiguation. Accordingly, a suitable retraining of the deep convolutional neural networks supporting recognition of graspable parts is implemented. A mixed reality strategy allows the reuse of available high-quality segmentation masks to generate realistic images procedurally, extending the range of scenarios supported by the final device. Experimental results confirm that the proposed pipeline improves target disambiguation accuracy by up to 9% compared with existing solutions, while preserving the computational cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29474
Omni-modal large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in audio and video understanding. However, existing models struggle with long-form, multi-speaker videos, especially in understanding the entire video and recognizing who says what and when. To characterize the capability limit of current omni LLMs and guide future model development, we introduce Omnilingual-MsASR, a multilingual, multimodal benchmark for long-form Multi-speaker Automatic Speech Recognition (MsASR) covering six languages, recordings up to 30 minutes, and scenarios with up to 20 speakers. Omnilingual-MsASR provides parallel audio and video inputs to evaluate models' cross-modal consistency and their ability to exploit complementary cues across modalities. Extensive evaluations of leading omni-modal LLMs reveal substantial performance bottlenecks, while their tcpWERs frequently exceed 100%. These findings highlight fine-grained temporal localization, speaker disambiguation, and cross-modal synergy as key challenges for future omni-modal foundation models. Our work is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29455
Multimodal multi-label emotion recognition is important for affect-aware systems, but models trained with complete text, visual, and acoustic streams often degrade sharply when some streams are unavailable at deployment. We address this train-test gap by learning a compact representation that preserves emotion-specific evidence from any available subset of modalities. We propose the Multi-modal Emotion Recognition Perceiver (MERP), which maps the joint sequence into a fixed-size latent bank, thereby keeping repeated reasoning independent of raw input length; it extracts label-specific evidence before and after latent reasoning and aligns the two levels through reconstruction. MERP further uses positive and negative class prototypes, a noise-gated feature enhancer with frequency-shaped perturbations during training, and confidence-aware class-wise fusion to strengthen separability, reduce sensitivity to missing inputs, and combine complementary predictors. Under 20 percent test-time random modality drop, MERP achieves micro-F1 scores of 0.563 on CMU-MOSEI and 0.780 on M3ED, exceeding the strongest evaluated baselines by 0.004 and 0.005, respectively; in the severe CMU-MOSEI audio-only setting, it retains 0.473 micro-F1 versus 0.022 for LDDU. These results show that fixed latent reasoning provides a practical, testable route to robust multimodal emotion recognition without requiring missing-modality examples during training. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29430
Thermal cameras enable robots to perceive human activities in darkness while revealing less personally identifiable appearance information and fewer details of the surrounding environment than RGB cameras. As vision-language models (VLMs), originally developed for RGB imagery, are increasingly integrated into embodied systems for scene understanding and high-level planning, thermal sensing offers a promising way to extend activity perception to low-light and privacy-sensitive settings. However, the failure modes of VLMs in thermal human activity understanding for human-robot interaction (HRI) remain underexplored. We fill this gap by evaluating seven locally deployable VLMs, including models developed for physical AI and robotics, on two person-centric thermal datasets. Our diagnostic tasks examine fine-grained action recognition, activity timeline reconstruction, and the ability to withhold unsupported answers. Paired RGB recordings serve as a performance reference, while controlled variations in frame sampling, thermal input presentation, and reasoning are used to assess whether the observed errors can be mitigated. Our results show that models can recognize broad activity categories but struggle with fine-grained actions such as coughing, sneezing, and yawning. They also produce inaccurate event timelines and hallucinate actions involving objects. Simple thermal input preprocessing and additional reasoning offer only limited, model-dependent gains. Abstention behavior also varies across models even under explicit instructions, limiting their reliability for practical robotic use.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29244
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at 2D recognition but often fail to maintain consistent 3D relations across sparse viewpoints, leading to spatial hallucinations under occlusion and perspective changes. Existing methods commonly fuse all frames with dense geometry, incurring substantial computation and context overhead while encouraging blind reliance on imperfect estimators. We present Think-Capture, a query-conditioned framework that first identifies task-critical objects and then acquires their geometry on demand. A 3D toolkit lifts zero-shot masks into a common coordinate frame, and a Symbolic 3D State Abstraction compresses object and camera states into structured text. Hierarchical Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains the VLM on cases in which geometry either helps or misleads, teaching it when to use tool evidence and when to fall back on visual cues. Think-Capture-4B reaches 54.4% on MindCube-Tiny (+21.5 points over its backbone), 39.1% on the MMSI-Bench positional subset (+7.9), and 42.8% on ViewSpatial (+5.2). It also remains robust under coordinate and mask perturbations. The full stack fits one 24 GB GPU and serves as an asynchronous high-level reasoner on an Agibot G1. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29232
In video action detection, modeling the temporal dependencies in continuous video streams is crucial. Previous methods based on deep neural networks can perform frame-level video recognition tasks. However, these methods struggle to model dynamic temporal patterns, facing challenges such as redundant frame information, difficulty balancing global and local features, and insufficient fusion of visual and textual features. To address these issues, we propose a video temporal attention module based on the Multi-Scale Latent Temporal Compression Attention, which aggregates continuous temporal sequences into feature representations across diverse temporal scales while efficiently reducing redundancy. We also introduce a Video-Text Cross Attention Fusion module that leverages cross-attention at both latent and standard feature levels, achieving fine-grained fusion between video and textual features to enhance semantic alignment and feature interaction. Experimental results across multiple video recognition benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve superior performance compared to existing methods, validating the effectiveness and generalization capability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29176
Synthesised data is a common strategy to address the lack of annotated handwritten music scores in Optical Music Recognition (OMR). Smashcima is a recent synthesis framework that assembles pages of handwritten scores by sampling glyph images from MUSCIMA++ and positioning them with hard-coded rules. In this work we ask whether these rules are grounded empirically and whether a learned model for context-dependent positioning can further improve synthesis quality. We extract inter-glyph distributions from around 285 thousand annotated relationships across MUSCIMA++ and OmniOMR, finding that several key parameters deviate systematically from real handwriting. Replacing these constants with empirical means reduces positioning RMSE by up to 60%. We then train a Graph Neural Network (GNN) on the Music Notation Graph structure to predict context-dependent offsets, achieving an additional 50 to 85% RMSE reduction on stems and beams by modelling how neighbouring glyphs constrain placement. Cross-dataset analysis shows that spacing differences between the two corpora are explained by note density (3.3), not style, and that duration-proportional spacing does not hold in handwriting (R2 = 0.001). In downstream evaluation, a YOLOv8 detector pretrained on GNN-positioned synthetic data achieves +30% mAP50 over the baseline and +11% over empirical means when fine-tuned on 200 real handwritten staves, showing that positioning accuracy matters for downstream OMR.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28899
Despite advancements in automatic speech recognition systems (ASR), current systems exhibit speaker-attribute bias, i.e., their speech recognition performance is biased against certain speakers based on their demographic attributes such as gender, accents, and speaker type. However, accurately assessing speaker attribute bias in a given ASR system requires the availability of a bias evaluation dataset with comparable speech across subgroups of a speaker attribute. In this paper, we introduce African speech Bias Evaluation Dataset (AfriBED), a novel speech recognition bias evaluation dataset for two low resource African languages, Bemba and Nyanja, to detect and estimate gender and speaker-type bias for ASR systems. The dataset comprises 9 hours of speech with 3928 utterances recorded by 80 speakers for Bemba, while the Nyanja set includes 6260 utterances with approximately 18 hours of speech recorded by 127 speakers. The results of our baseline experiments demonstrate that the datasets are useful for examining gender and speaker-type attribute bias in the target languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26821
Few-shot image classification (FSIC) frequently suffers from visual ambiguity, where background clutter and RGB appearance similarities hinder discriminative feature matching in data-scarce settings. To mitigate this, we propose DAFIC, a geometry-guided framework that incorporates monocular depth into representation learning, episodic adaptation, and dense support-query matching. DAFIC first learns geometry-aware token representations through RGB-D self-supervised pre-training. Subsequently, the Depth-guided Geometric Adaptation (DGA) module uses depth-derived geometry to refine patch representations with geometry-enriched class context while suppressing background interference. Spatial Bidirectional Patch Matching (SBiM) then performs bidirectional dense matching on the refined features, reducing sensitivity to spurious correspondences and background clutter. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that DAFIC achieves strong performance against existing methods, with ablation and robustness analyses supporting the effectiveness of coupling geometry-conditioned episodic adaptation with bidirectional matching for few-shot visual recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28856
Early-grade reading screening is critical for identifying children at risk of reading difficulty. Existing AI-based screeners are often limited in the scope of their analyses and evaluation metrics, or are proprietary systems that lack transparent model specifications and evaluation. We present KIRA, a dual-pathway screening system that pairs word-level fluency scoring with detailed phoneme-level error detection. We adapt pretrained word and phoneme recognizers to children's speech, reducing word error rate from 13.88% to 8.84% and phoneme error rate from 41.66% to 23.00%. Powered by these child-adapted models, we implement Word Reading (WRE) and Oral Reading Fluency (ORF), two foundational tasks in K-2 screening. The system integrates these recognizers with a web-based teacher-facing interface presenting fluency scores alongside phoneme feedback for potential targeted intervention. KIRA brings modern child-speech recognition into a full-stack, deployable, classroom-ready reading screener.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28840
This study proposes a sketch-to-simulation system to solve handwritten circuit diagrams. The system converts raw images into a Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE)-compatible netlist and automatically calculates the circuit's nodal voltages and currents. Another objective is to propose a holistic framework that benefits students and educators by enhancing the teaching and learning experience of electric circuits and expediting engineering design reviews. This article presents a multistage pipeline that converts raw photographs of handwritten electric circuits into executable SPICE-like netlists, providing a solution. A dataset of 1,000 hand-drawn Resistor-Inductor-Capacitor (RLC) circuits was curated and annotated for components, text regions, and character recognition. The proposed system decomposes a circuit diagram into three stages: (i) dual You Only Look Once (YOLO)-based detectors for components and text regions, (ii) a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)-based domain-aware symbol value extraction, and (iii) image processing with thresholding, skeletonization, and Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) to automatically identify nodes and map them with corresponding components. The proposed system produces the netlist and solves the circuit. The qualitative and quantitative ablation studies on modular stages, as well as end-to-end tests, demonstrate robust performance across various handwriting styles, lighting conditions, and this http URL study serves as an interactive learning aid and practical tool for professionals, providing a comprehensive user interface (UI), enabling rapid digitization of circuit sketches for study, design, prototyping, or troubleshooting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28836
Conventional visual sensing faces a fundamental dilemma: information that should remain private today may need to be recovered tomorrow. This challenge is becoming increasingly important as cameras become pervasive in our daily surroundings. Existing safeguards either protect visual content only after an image is formed or suppress information during capture in ways that prevent its later recovery. Here, we show through an information-theoretic analysis that privacy and recoverability cannot be achieved simultaneously in static optical systems. Information preserved in a measurement for later reconstruction also remains available to an observer of that measurement, limiting the privacy such systems can provide. To overcome this limitation, we introduce conditional imaging, an imaging approach that changes the optical state for every captured frame. The measurement alone conceals the scene, while knowledge of the corresponding physical system state enables its reconstruction. We analyze how the optical parameters determine the information that can be recovered and use this analysis to guide the design of a camera prototype. We evaluate the system on a captured dataset of human faces using increasingly powerful attempts to recover the scene, from direct visualization and computational inversion to learned reconstruction and identity recognition. Our experiments show that conditional imaging preserves identity in authorized reconstructions while withholding visual information from observers without access to the system state. By making the physical state of the camera part of the information needed for reconstruction, conditional imaging enables visual information to be protected at the point of capture while remaining recoverable for future authorized use.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28835
Objects move, cameras pan, and weather drifts with the wind: much of what changes in sequential data is motion. Motion changes where things are, not what they are, and is therefore a symmetry of the data. Yet standard recurrent networks are not equivariant to it: their memory stays put while the input moves on. Flow equivariant recurrent networks first brought this symmetry into sequence models, for motions of constant velocity, or flows, by enumerating a bank of velocities. We extend this idea in three directions: from simple recurrent networks to convolutional LSTMs, from flows to motions whose velocity changes in time, and from enumerating velocities to estimating them. Treating a sequence as a field over time, we show that motion becomes a gauge symmetry: a global symmetry made local in time. Built on this view, our motion equivariant convolutional LSTM (MELSTM) uses its velocity model as the gauge field and is provably equivariant to every motion. Across future-frame prediction, classification of digits visible only through their motion, and action recognition under camera shake, MELSTM outperforms a convolutional LSTM and its flow equivariant counterpart with the same number of parameters: it is more accurate, generalizes to longer horizons and to unseen motions, and carries a fraction of the flow equivariant model's state.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28771