The use of accurate vision models for crop monitoring, disease diagnosis, and plant phenotyping in agriculture is hindered by the lack of expertly annotated data, especially in developing countries. We propose A100, an agricultural vision foundation model that is pre-trained using self-supervised learning on 3 million unlabeled images from fields covering more than 100 crop species. A100 uses a hybrid CNN-Transformer backbone that fuses MBConv stages for local feature extraction with Transformer stages for global contextual representation. A100 uses pre-training with the integration of DINO self-distillation, iBOT masked patch reconstruction, and KoLeo uniformity regularization, resulting in features that are better than ImageNet-12K supervised representations for agricultural applications without any fine-tuning. By utilizing a frozen backbone, the accuracy for crop classification of A100 is 95.37%, which is +2.56% better than ImageNet-12K, and reduces the leaf count error by 10.4% on the GroMo25 phenotyping benchmark, proving that the same backbone can be used for classification and regression tasks. After full fine-tuning, the performance of A100 is 99.90% on 32-class crop identification and 99.02% on 44-class disease detection. On the difficult PlantDoc dataset, A100 outperforms all baselines, such as CvT-13 (64.89% against 63.56%). Remarkably, A100 obtains 98.01% accuracy on plant classification using just 1% of the labelled data (about 284 images per category), showing great label efficiency for use cases with limited labeling. Under an identical protocol, A100 also outperforms the publicly released agricultural foundation models FoMo4Wheat and LeafVision by more than 14 points at 1% labels. We plan to publicly release our pretrained model to allow agricultural professionals to adapt A100 for various plant analysis applications using limited annotations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22991
Low-cost passive leader arms enable scalable data collection for imitation learning, but their lack of restoring forces leaves redundant joints unconstrained, yielding highly inconsistent joint-space trajectories. We address this with a low-cost passive joint module (an adjustable mechanical clutch and a 3D-printed spiral spring) that pulls each joint toward a user-defined neutral posture. This passive restoring force acts as a physical prior equivalent to joint-space $L_2$ regularization (``Hardware-as-Regularization''), improving kinematic consistency with shorter completion time than an unregularized arm and preserved movement smoothness. Experiments show substantial variance reduction over a naive passive arm, trajectory consistency on par with an active virtual spring of the same actuator class, and substantially higher downstream success rates (e.g., 73.3% vs. 36.7% on Block Stacking); a stiffness sweep shows consistency degrading monotonically as stiffness decreases, confirming that mechanical stiffness behaves like a regularization weight.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22977
Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a standard component of conditional diffusion models, and guided generation performance has become the \textit{de facto} measure of state-of-the-art models. Recent work on latent diffusion models seeks to learn latent spaces that are easier to model with diffusion. However, under CFG, generation additionally depends on how conditions are arranged in the latent space. We study this arrangement under discrete class conditions, termed \emph{class geometry}, and investigate what class geometry allows a latent space to work well with CFG. Under a Gaussian class model, we show that shifting variance from intra- to inter-class at fixed total variance makes classes more distinguishable under noise, and derive a noisy posterior objective whose per-sample descent direction is proportional to the oracle CFG correction. Based on the analysis, we propose Prototype Regularization (PR), a lightweight surrogate for the intractable noisy posterior objective, which applies a cosine prototype classifier to spatially pooled latents. With a controlled training budget (20 epochs for VAE, 80 epochs for DiT), adding PR to an LDM baseline reduces guided gFID on ImageNet from 3.31 to 2.28, surpassing a DINOv3-aligned VA-VAE (2.44) with negligible overhead. We further demonstrate that PR generalizes to pseudo-labels derived from clustering, continuous text-embedding conditions, and video latents. Together, our findings highlight class geometry as a critical factor in guided generation and take a first step toward CFG-compatible representation learning. Our project page is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22885
Practical non-line-of-sight (NLOS) measurements are affected by noise and deviations from idealized light transport, which can degrade reconstruction with conventional light-cone transform (LCT) methods. We propose the Measurement-Adaptive Light-Cone Transform (MALCT), a physics-guided framework that retains the efficient Fourier-domain inversion structure of LCT. {Within a unified variational formulation, MALCT combines the analytical response with a shared learned response through measurement-conditioned weighting and predicts a measurement-conditioned, frequency-dependent regularization map.} An attention-enhanced spatio-temporal feature extraction module captures long-range temporal dependencies and local spatial correlations to support reconstruction under low-signal conditions. Experiments on synthetic data and real measurements from different NLOS systems demonstrate improved reconstruction quality. Controlled evaluations further assess robustness to temporal-response broadening and reduced acquisition time. MALCT also preserves scene structures with spatial sampling grids down to $32\times32$, supporting its potential for NLOS imaging under limited acquisition budgets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22847
Large language model (LLM) unlearning aims to forget certain information while preserving others, without retraining from scratch. SoTA methods such as NPO, SimNPO, and SatImp balance forgetting and retain through whole model fine-tuning, while FOM-UL explores selective layer updates. Prior works show that suppressing target information can damage retained knowledge. This trade-off can vary across layers even under the same unlearning loss. In this work, we propose Confidence-Weighted Layerwise Unlearning (CoLU), which combines a novel confidence-weighted forgetting and retain regularization while updating a single selected transformer layer, rather than the whole model for unlearning. To reduce CoLU compute cost, we further propose Brief Layer Screening (BLS), which uses a newly defined normalized forgetting-retention (NFR) score to first rank layers through a brief unlearning trials using a subset of forgetting dataset and fewer epochs. BLS pre-selects top-k ranked layer candidates, which will then be fully profiled using full data analysis. BLS is proven to reduce the runtime of CoLU by 60.2-79.7% with almost the same performance. On TOFU dataset, CoLU improves both forgetting and retention over NPO, SatImp, and GA-based FOM-UL in all six TOFU settings, and over SimNPO in five of the six settings. On MUSE Books and News datasets, CoLU achieves the highest retained KnowMem and the PrivLeak closest to zero among the compared SOTA unlearning methods. CoLU presents a new record performance in both unlearning and retain in most settings up to date. Moreover, across the measured settings, average CoLU GPU memory usage is 77.4% to 79.5% lower than full-model unlearning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22721
We study explanation fairness in hate speech detection. High classification performance does not always mean that a model produces equally plausible explanations for different demographic groups. Using the HateXplain dataset, we introduce Plausibility-EFG, a metric that measures the largest difference in explanation plausibility across demographic groups by comparing model-generated token attributions with human-annotated rationales. We evaluate BERT, RoBERTa, and ADV-RoBERTa, an adversarially trained model, using Integrated Gradients and SHAP. Our results show that ADV-RoBERTa improves classification performance and alignment between explanations and human rationales while reducing explanation disparities across demographic groups. These improvements are observed with both attribution methods and remain consistent across training, validation, and test splits. We also show that reducing prediction-level bias alone does not eliminate disparities in explanations, suggesting that predictive fairness and explanation fairness are related but distinct objectives. Finally, our fairness-performance analysis shows that stronger adversarial regularization can further reduce Plausibility-EFG, although it may cause a small decrease in macro-F1. Overall, this work presents explanation fairness as an important objective in hate speech moderation and introduces Fair-REF, a framework designed to reduce disparities in model explanations across demographic groups.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22586
Splatting-based radiance-field representations have recently gained popularity in robotic perception, enabling high-quality novel-view synthesis (NVS) through explicit scene primitives. However, existing splatting methods typically rely on iterative nonlinear optimization that jointly optimizes millions of coupled primitive parameters, resulting in substantial computation time, peak GPU memory consumption, and susceptibility to local minima. In this paper, we propose CF-Splat, a novel closed-form triangle-splatting framework for efficient scene appearance estimation over a known mesh either pre-existing or provided by upstream mapping or reconstruction pipelines. Our key insight is that, by properly formulating the problem over the given mesh geometry and calibrated cameras, the rendered pixel colors can be expressed linearly with respect to the per-vertex spherical harmonics (SH) coefficients, allowing multi-view scene appearance estimation to be formulated as a global linear least-squares (LLS) problem without the need of iterative nonlinear optimization. To guarantee a well-posed solution under uneven multi-view observation coverage, we introduce adaptive SH regularization that constrains insufficiently supported high-order SH coefficients and yields a unique global minimizer. To ensure the scalability to large-scale scenes, we develop a triangle-structured matrix-free preconditioned conjugate-gradient solver that avoids explicitly constructing the large sparse normal system while producing the same LLS solution. Experiments on diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that CF-Splat achieves competitive or superior NVS quality compared with state-of-the-art splatting methods. While, CF-Splat requires approximately 27.5-378.0 times less computation time and 1.8 times lower peak GPU memory on average than 3DGS across scenes of different scales on a consumer-grade laptop.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22108
Deepfake detectors safeguard against misinformation, rendering their failures as much a societal as a technical concern. As generators constantly evolve, detectors trained on static datasets miss newly arising threats, while progressive training interferes catastrophically. Yet, mitigating forgetfulness in terms of accuracy, the prevalent focus of continual learning (CL), is insufficient to reflect real-world impact. We therefore scrutinize the effects of CL methods with respect to evolving fairness. To this end, we analyze four dimensions of fairness across diverse demographics for detectors trained progressively on a chronological sequence of 11 real-world deepfake generation methods. Tracking fairness metrics over time, we expose non-trivial interplays between performance and fairness that depend on both the choice of CL algorithm and demographic intersections. We find accuracy degradation to typically exacerbate unfairness and, conversely, fairness improvements to remain scarce over time. Dissecting the CL method families (rehearsal, prompts, regularization), we observe that inequitable forgetting is not explained by underrepresentation alone, but likely entangled with representation learning. We thus issue a call to action for CL methods to take social outcomes into account when balancing the stability-plasticity tradeoff.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21974
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently gained popularity for their ability to model functions using simple and lightweight networks. These methods have also proven effective in deformable image registration. In this work, we extend INRs for deformable image registration to the domain of temporal image registration, focusing on periodic temporal image sequences. Our approach, Temporal-IDIR, optimizes a single INR to model deformations across all frames in a temporal image sequence simultaneously, allowing for self-regularization through its own deformation predictions. To achieve this, we introduce a temporal consistency loss that penalizes discrepancies between direct source-to-target transformations and those traversing intermediate frames. We evaluate our framework on the DIR-LAB dataset, using the target registration error (TRE) between annotated and moved landmarks as the metric. Here, we achieve a TRE of 1.03 mm, outperforming other INR-based registration methods. Additionally, our framework supports smooth interpolation between time frames by estimating deformations between the given input frames. Code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21845
We adapt the diffeomorphic coarse-to-fine LapIRN architecture for longitudinal whole-body PSMA PET/CT registration in the Learn2Reg 2026 PSMAReg challenge. The method combines affine pre-registration, multi-modal deformable registration, and test-time instance optimization. We further introduce PET biomarker preservation losses for metabolic tumor volume (MTV) and total lesion glycolysis (TLG), including Jacobian-based constraints, and a per-structure rigidity regularization for skeletal structures. The submitted configuration achieved 81.0% DSC and 6.17 mm HD95, with MTV and TLG errors of 3.3% and 3.3%, respectively, on our evaluation protocol. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21451
Reliable image geometric estimation from noisy matching points is typically addressed using RANSAC, often combined with local optimization to refine inliers and model parameters. However, existing paradigms are predominantly residual-centric; even heuristic attempts to enforce spatial uniformity suffer from a sequential, two-stage nature that inherently decouples distribution optimization from geometric refinement, preventing an effective trade-off. In this paper, we propose DLOSAC, a local optimization framework that jointly incorporates both geometric consistency and spatial distribution information. We begin by constructing a Delaunay triangulation over candidate inliers to explicitly encode neighborhood topology. The geometric module introduces an edge-based consistency metric to evaluate geometric errors, while the spatial module derives distribution descriptors from triangle areas and edge attributes to quantify the clustering of inliers. Finally, we combine edge-based geometric constraints, spatial distribution regularization, and traditional point-level geometric constraints to improve the quality of geometric parameters. Extensive experiments on six publicly available real-world datasets, covering three types of geometric estimation tasks, achieve state-of-the-art performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21215
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used upstream of decision-making to clean data, detect label errors, and reconstruct missing values. Yet LLM-assisted data curation creates a new operational tradeoff: higher-fidelity models and richer prompts can be substantially more expensive, while the value of this additional fidelity depends on the downstream optimization accuracy. This raises the central question of this work: when should one pay for a better LLM, given a specific downstream task at hand? We study this question through stochastic optimization with mixed-fidelity first-order oracles, which can have systematic bias and state-dependent variance. We develop two cost-aware algorithmic frameworks that allow adaptive switching between stochastic oracles. With known bias, the first meta-algorithm applies a restarted, cost-aware policy that adaptively selects oracle fidelity across optimization stages. Its cumulative cost is no larger than that of the best fixed oracle in hindsight and can be substantially smaller. With unknown bias, we develop a budgeted certification scheme that uses occasional trusted-gradient evaluations to certify the optimization progress and eliminate unsuccessful oracle sources, and show an explicit tradeoff between certification cost and delayed detection of biased sources. We provide concrete realizations of these meta-algorithms by applying biased stochastic gradient extrapolation (SGE) and recursive regularization under state-dependent noise as subroutines. Synthetic and LLM-completion experiments illustrate the qualitative switching behavior predicted by the theory: the adaptive policy skips several expensive LLM oracles and substantially reduces cumulative cost relative to fixed high-fidelity alternatives while achieving comparable accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21139
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards often trains language models on responses generated by a different, possibly stale behavior policy. Correcting this mismatch with learner-to-behavior importance weights can introduce high variance for long responses. We introduce Gibbs-Gap Policy Optimization (GGPO), which minimizes a log-mean-exp contrast of KL-adjusted rewards among responses to the same prompt, without learner-to-behavior importance weights. We derive GGPO from KL-regularized policy optimization: on policy, its population loss is exactly the KL-regularized optimality gap, and under suitable coverage the learner's single-response expected reward is at least the behavior policy's best-of-$K$ reward, minus terms for the raw finite-group loss, regularization, and finite training data. We characterize reference refresh through exact Gibbs-target composition and a finite-data final-policy reward bound under local reference control and tokenwise behavior mismatch. This refresh is empirically important: in an ablation, fixed-reference GGPO scores $32.96$ on the five-benchmark problem-weighted average, versus $46.58$ with the default refresh schedule. Experiments on mathematical reasoning further show that GGPO outperforms GRPO and AGRO under training-inference mismatch and on fixed offline data, while maintaining its performance as controlled policy staleness grows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20814
Post-training binds the competence of an LLM agent to the interface it was trained on. Semantics-preserving perturbations of that interface, such as renaming an action or changing the notation, leave the underlying task unchanged yet make the agent worse at it. Scoring each sample independently means interface randomization only broadens this dependence from a single interface to the training interface distribution, so out-of-distribution perturbations still degrade the agent. We propose Cross-Interface Policy Regularization (CIPR), a self-supervised objective that replaces action names with uninformative identifiers and presents each training sample under two interfaces in which equivalent actions are identified by construction. CIPR penalizes the KL divergence between the action distributions induced under the two interfaces, so the policy behaves consistently across them. We evaluate CIPR in both supervised and reinforcement-learning post-training, where it improves robustness. On agentic function calling, held-out interface perturbations reduce the accuracy of a post-trained agent by nearly 25%, and CIPR recovers 10.5% while leaving accuracy on the unchanged interface intact.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20576
Slider-based control aims to give users continuous, fine-grained control over the intensity of individual edits in instruction-based image editing. However, existing approaches fail to deliver reliable continuous controllability: traversing a slider can produce abrupt visual jumps and non-monotonic changes, while jointly controlled sliders can interfere with one another. To systematically study these limitations, we introduce SlideBench, a comprehensive benchmark for continuous image editing spanning diverse editing categories and equipped with a unified suite of metrics quantifying monotonic progression, perceptual continuity, and inter-slider disentanglement. Building on these observations, we propose SliderEdit++, which explicitly regularizes the intermediate editing trajectory rather than supervising only its endpoints. Our method combines velocity- and semantic-space trajectory regularization with spectral control to encourage smooth, predictable slider traversal, together with a disentanglement objective that reduces interference between independently controlled edits. On SlideBench, SliderEdit++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving the overall score by 18.5% relative to the strongest baseline. At the same time, using a few-step editing backbone makes our method approximately 3x to 20x faster than existing slider-based approaches, enabling substantially more responsive interactive editing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14253
Despite the Markov assumption, safety failures in robot reinforcement learning rarely occur instantaneously; they typically emerge over several steps as the policy enters unfamiliar states under disturbances and domain shift. We address this limitation by learning a receding-horizon safety critic that predicts whether a state will remain non-terminating over the next receding horizon, enabling anticipatory detection of impending locomotion failures. The critic is trained from rollout-derived horizon labels with a composite objective that combines horizon classification, control-barrier-function-inspired temporal consistency, and smoothness regularization, and we aggregate an ensemble of critics with a conservative Conditional Value at Risk estimate to account for uncertainty. Building on the learned critic, we derive a closed-form, differentiable CBF-style safety filter that minimally modifies the policy action to improve predicted safety, and integrate it into PPO with an anticipation loss to reduce policy-filter mismatch during training. In simulated quadruped locomotion, our method improves robustness under action noise, external perturbations, and terrain shifts, reducing catastrophic failures while maintaining competitive returns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20255
Self-supervised joint embedding learning aligns representations of augmented views while regularizing their distribution to prevent collapse. Regularization aims to shape the overall representation distribution, but most joint embedding methods restrict its computation to the active minibatch. We propose out-of-batch regularization, which maintains a dataset-level state in CPU memory and uses globally constructed per-instance targets during minibatch training. Evaluated on natural images and biomedical datasets, these anchors approximate the full-dataset regularization gradient more faithfully than conventional minibatch estimation at small batch sizes. Applications to contrastive (SimCLR) and non-contrastive (SIGReg) approaches show consistent improvement over the corresponding in-batch objectives for image classification, minority-class performance under controlled imbalance, instance retrieval, and continued self-supervised pretraining, with the largest gains at small batch sizes. These results suggest that dataset-level regularization can be decoupled from minibatch optimization, making batch size an optimization choice that does not affect the geometry of the regularizer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20158
Reliable fault detection is crucial for industrial machinery in large-scale facilities, where unexpected failures can cause costly downtime and production interruptions. Although acoustic monitoring provides a scalable solution for machine condition monitoring, its deployment is often constrained by high false-positive rates. We propose a two-step approach to automatic anomalous sound detection: first, when only normal operating audio samples are available, a regularized unsupervised model is deployed; then, after the first machine fault, a few-shot adaptation strategy exploits the anomalous samples acquired during the fault to improve the system. This adaptation increases the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPR) from 23.0 to 64.0 and improves detection in the low false-positive-rate region, with the partial area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (pAUROC) increasing from 39.6 to 72.8. We also show that covariance regularization improves both prediction accuracy and training stability in the unsupervised model. These results provide a practical strategy for acoustic anomaly detection systems, enabling improved accuracy and reduced false alarms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19893
We present VGGT-Diff, a geometry-routed multi-view diffusion model for sparse-view novel view synthesis. Existing novel view synthesis (NVS) methods face a fundamental trade-off: reconstruction-based approaches preserve observed geometry but struggle to synthesize unseen regions, while diffusion-based methods provide strong generative priors yet rely on implicit source-to-query correspondence. VGGT-Diff bridges these regimes by routing visual geometry latents from VGGT-{\Omega} into a pretrained video diffusion model. Each visual token is associated with a 3D point and confidence, then transformed into query-aligned latent conditions through a confidence-aware Visual Geometry Router (VGR) that preserves front and back surface evidence. These conditions guide joint target-view denoising, while Point-Track Residual Consistency (PTRC) regularizes predicted-clean residuals along reliable 3D tracks, improving multi-view stability. We further introduce robust geometry conditioning, combining training-time regularization with inference-time guidance for improved robustness. Experiments show competitive or state-of-the-art performance across interpolation and extrapolation under different viewpoint difficulties. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.33253
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in language models, but scalar outcomes provide coarse supervision over response trajectories. Self-distillation offers denser token-level guidance by comparing an unassisted policy with a feedback-informed self-teacher, yet the teacher evolves with the student, creating unstable targets and motivating additional regularization. We introduce Function-Space Policy Optimization (FSPO), a single-policy framework that combines current privileged adaptation with function-space temporal consolidation. FSPO stores sparse historical next-token distributions as fixed temporal targets, providing temporal separation without maintaining a persistent teacher model. It further introduces privileged disagreement correction to explicitly suppress locally overvalued actions, reliability-adaptive grounding that strengthens reference supervision when self-generated evidence repeatedly fails, and quality and coverage-aware temporal memory that retains verified behaviors and improves privileged demonstrations. Across reasoning and tool-use benchmarks, FSPO achieves the highest average accuracy under a 5-hour training budget, improving over the strongest baseline by approximately 4% points on average while reducing peak memory from about 70 GB to 56 GB on Olmo3-7B-Instruct.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19687