Represenation
-
MedPlex: Deep Vision-Language Co-Adaptation for Clinically Grounded Medical Segmentation
2026-08-13 18:37:13Rafi Ibn Sultan, Hui Zhu, Chengyin Li, Dongxiao ZhuAbstract
Medical image segmentation is still largely treated as a vision-only problem, although clinical interpretation often relies on textual knowledge of anatomy, location, appearance, and surrounding context. Existing text-guided segmentation methods within the Vision-Language Model (VLM) paradigm often use language only as a late conditioning signal, limiting its influence on visual representation learning. We introduce MedPlex (Medical Plexus of Vision and Language), an end-to-end VLM framework that makes text guidance a continuous, clinically grounded component of segmentation learning. Through Bi-Fusion (Bidirectional Fusion), visual and textual representations evolve jointly across the encoding hierarchy. MedPlex further introduces class-level and region-level concept alignment to organize the shared representation at complementary granularities. Class-level alignment anchors each anatomical target to an aggregated clinical concept profile, while region-level alignment preserves individual concepts, such as shape, location, appearance, and texture, through class-specific visual evidence. In this way, language provides structured supervision throughout the encoder rather than serving only as a late-stage cue. MedPlex achieves state-of-the-art performance across CT and MR benchmarks for multi-organ, cardiac substructure, and tumor segmentation, including settings with real free-text clinical supervision. Code: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13690
PDF
-
A Unifying Perspective on Causal World Models: From Observations to Representations to Structure
2026-08-13 16:40:35Avinash Kori, Fabrizio RussoAbstract
World Models (WM) are increasingly seen as a foundation for intelligent agents that can predict, plan, and act beyond their training distribution. In this paper, we study WMs from a causal perspective across multiple levels of abstraction, ranging from perceptual observations to building a conceptual representation of the structure governing the environment dynamics. We argue that useful WMs must go beyond generative capabilities alone: they should also capture entity properties, entity-to-entity interactions, and entity-to-environment interactions that determine and explain the dynamics of a system. We provide a formal definition of Causal WMs (CWMs) grounded in the tasks they are intended to support, connecting world modelling with existing work in causal representation learning, object-centric learning, causal discovery, structural causal models, and model-based decision-making. Finally, we relate CWMs to the literature on identifiability, clarifying when the components of a WM can be recovered from data and up to which equivalence. With this, we ground WMs in representations and structures that support causal reasoning and informed decision-making.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13456
PDF
-
A Controlled Study of Self-Supervised Image and Video Pretraining under Limited Resources
2026-08-13 12:47:36Brun\'o B. Englert, Gijs DubbelmanAbstract
Visual foundation models are a cornerstone of image and video understanding but typically require large amounts of data and computation. The current scale required for pretraining visual foundation models may be unsustainable or unnecessary, and significant benefits arise when effective models can be obtained with fewer resources. To better understand how self-supervised learning (SSL) objectives behave under resource constraints, we conduct a controlled study of image and video SSL objectives under matched data, architecture, and compute budgets. We compare contrastive, reconstruction, feature-prediction, and diffusion objectives and evaluate both standalone and jointly trained image-video SSL formulations across a diverse set of image and video understanding tasks. Our results show that DINOv2-style pretraining consistently provides the strongest overall performance under limited resources. Furthermore, combining DINOv2 with video SSL objectives such as VideoMAE substantially improves image classification and segmentation performance, but degrades video tracking and camera-pose estimation performance, revealing an important tradeoff between semantic and geometric representation learning. These findings suggest that combining image and video SSL objectives can be beneficial in resource-limited settings, while highlighting the need for improved methods that better balance semantic, temporal, and geometric supervision.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13183
PDF
-
Paths: Prompt-aware Spatio-temporal Transformer with Hierarchical Multi-modal Fusion for RGB-Event Video Person Re-Identification
2026-08-13 10:58:47Yakun Huo, Yingquan Wang, Yangyang Liu, Tianyu Yan, Yunzhi Zhuge, Pingping Zhang, Huchuan LuAbstract
RGB-Event Video Person Re-Identification (RE-VReID) aims to retrieve specific person across non-overlapping cameras with complementary RGB videos and event streams. However, existing methods often decouple spatial and temporal modeling, which limits their interaction. In addition, global-level RGB-Event fusion fails to fully exploit fine-grained discriminative cues. To address these issues, we propose Paths, a unified framework with spatio-temporal modeling and hierarchical multi-modal fusion for RE-VReID. Specifically, we first design a Memory-Augmented Backbone (MAB) to maintain modality-specific identity prototypes for stable intra-modal representation learning. Then, we propose a Prompt-aware Spatio-temporal Transformer (PST) to jointly model spatial and temporal cues within a unified Transformer. Finally, we introduce a Hierarchical Multi-modal Fusion (HMF) to integrate RGB and event features at global and local levels. With these modules, our framework can learn robust and discriminative representations for RE-VReID. Extensive experiments on three public RE-VReID benchmarks including EvReID, MARS and iLIDS-VID, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13092
PDF
-
EEG-PRIME: Prototype-Aligned Representation Learning with Multi-Level Conditioning for EEG Decoding
2026-08-13 10:35:51Shuailei Zhang, Muyun Jiang, Wei Zhang, Jinbo Chen, Zhiwei Guo, Yong Li, Yi Ding, Cuntai GuanAbstract
Electroencephalography (EEG) decoding models often generalize poorly across datasets and subjects due to domain shifts in acquisition protocols and individual neurophysiology. We propose EEG-PRIME, a two-stage EEG foundation model for cross-dataset multi-task decoding. EEG-PRIME combines masked pretraining with prototype-aligned instruction tuning to enable instruction-aware and subject-invariant decoding across diverse BCI paradigms. During pretraining, an EEG encoder learns transferable representations through masked reconstruction with frequency-cutoff spectral augmentation. During instruction tuning, EEG-PRIME incorporates task-semantic, dataset-specific, and subject-invariant conditioning. The resulting conditioning signal modulates the Q-Former through Layer-wise Query Modulation, while frozen text embeddings of class labels serve as prototypes for cosine-similarity-based prediction across heterogeneous label spaces. Experiments on sixteen datasets covering motor imagery, emotion recognition, ADHD detection, covert speech, and mental workload show consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines and prior EEG foundation models under cross-subject settings. On two additional held-out datasets, EEG-PRIME achieves balanced accuracy comparable to within-session calibration models without target-domain optimization, calibration, or linear probing, demonstrating promising zero-shot transfer capability.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13072
PDF
-
NaviDC-OCR: Navigating Document Parsing Across Digital and Camera-Captured Documents
2026-08-13 07:34:21Peng Cai, Zhaofan Zou, Shifa Liu, Yikun Wang, Jiawei Tang, Kaicheng Yang, Meng Tong, Zhongjiang He, Hao SunAbstract
Document parsing aims to transform unstructured documents into structured and machine-readable representations. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced document parsing. However, existing approaches still face two major challenges. First, decoupled VLM-based methods heavily rely on accurate layout analysis, where geometric distortions in camera-captured documents can introduce cascading errors. Second, although end-to-end VLM-based methods alleviate the dependence on explicit layout detection, they often suffer from redundant generation, hallucinations, and insufficient structural reasoning in high-resolution scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose NaviDC-OCR, a unified framework for document parsing. NaviDC-OCR introduces deformation-aware learning to incorporate geometric perception into VLMs and proposes an adaptive sampling mechanism for complex layout representation. Furthermore, a content-structure decoupled learning strategy is developed to explicitly model formula grammars and table structures, enabling more effective structured representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NaviDC-OCR achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse document parsing benchmarks. It obtains overall scores of 96.87, 88.53 and 78.41 on OmniDocBench v1.6, Wild-OmniDocBench, and PureDocBench, respectively, and ranks first in the ICDAR 2026 Sci-ImageMiner Challenge. These results validate the effectiveness and generalization capability of NaviDC-OCR in complex document parsing scenarios.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12898
PDF
-
Dual-Manifold Geometry Guided Representation Learning: Adaptive Coupling between Kernel and Data Spaces
2026-08-13 02:35:08Wencong Zhang, Yue Zhang, Meiyan Huang, Wei Yang, Qianjin FengAbstract
Deep representation learning has primarily focused on how features evolve across network layers, while largely overlooking the structured geometry embedded in network parameters. We introduce a dual-manifold perspective in which each convolutional layer contains two coupled geometric spaces: a Kernel Manifold induced by convolutional filters and a Data Manifold characterized by intermediate feature representations. Because these manifolds share the same channel space, parameter geometry can provide complementary structural information to guide feature evolution. Based on this insight, we propose Kernel-Guided Feature Transform (KGFT), a lightweight module that derives a geometric guidance matrix from the kernel Gram matrix and uses it to transform the covariance structure of feature representations. Unlike conventional attention mechanisms that reweight feature responses, KGFT explicitly reshapes feature relationships by transferring geometric information from the kernel manifold to the data manifold. To accommodate network hierarchy, we further introduce Exploit and Explore modes with a depth-aware scheduling strategy and a learnable guidance strength that adaptively controls the contribution of geometric transformation. This design promotes geometric alignment in shallow layers while encouraging feature diversity in deeper layers, without imposing excessive constraints on representation learning. Theoretical analysis establishes the validity of the proposed transformation and characterizes its effect on feature covariance. Extensive experiments across CNN- and Transformer-based architectures, including ResNet, ViT, and LLaMA-7B, demonstrate consistent improvements on image classification and arithmetic reasoning tasks, validating the generality and effectiveness of kernel-guided dual-manifold representation learning. Code will be publicly available.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12737
PDF
-
AVA-Encoder: Towards Agent-Native Video Representation Learning
2026-08-12 17:58:02Chuyue Li, Jinpeng Yu, Haozhe Wang, Tian Xueyun, Zhijing Zhang, Bingnan Li, Shuqi Gu, Kan Ren, Jiaming Liu, Ruihua HuaAbstract
Creative agents still lack an effective way to learn from high-quality human films, limiting their ability to produce cinematic-grade videos. A key challenge is the absence of a structured video representation that is both faithful to film content and directly usable for agentic reasoning and manipulation. To address the challenge, we propose the Agentic Video Auto-Encoder (AVA-Encoder), a framework for learning agent-native video representations via agentic auto-encoding. AVA-Encoder transforms a video into a knowledge graph (KG) representation and then reconstructs it back into video. Its hierarchy and state nodes store structured text, while a linked asset layer holds generated images, audio, and video. Typed edges preserve the relations between these text descriptions and assets in a form that agents can easily understand, query, and edit. The video reconstruction differences drive a textual-gradient optimization framework, which expresses evaluation feedback as natural-language update directions for Data-Independent Encoding Policy Pseudo-Training in the outer loop and optional Data-Dependent KG Representation Refinement in the test-time inner loop. Extensive experiments show that AVA-Encoder improves by 20.7 percentage points over the strongest external baseline. In the controlled policy-only setting, its pseudo-trained shot-level Agentic Video Encoder policy also outperforms a carefully human-tuned policy while using 74.3% fewer system-prompt tokens. We release the complete AVA-Encoder framework, a reliable agentic video reconstruction benchmark, and the first dataset of high-quality film KG representations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12313
PDF
-
Generation as Auxiliary Supervision: Enhancing Visual Understanding at Zero Inference Overhead via Decoupled Embedding Prediction
2026-08-12 16:03:31Zhongbin Guo, Jiahao Xie, Dongling Xiao, Qianle Wang, Ruiqi Lu, Xiaomin He, Wanxuan Sun, Cheng YangAbstract
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, visual understanding and generation are typically treated as divergent objectives. Existing unified frameworks often rely on discrete visual tokenization or diffusion objectives whose generative targets differ from the continuous representations consumed by visual understanding models, making direct transfer to enhance existing pretrained MLLMs non-trivial. In this work, we present GAS, a generation-guided training framework that reinterprets visual generation as auxiliary supervision for representation learning. Concretely, GAS adapts Next Embedding Prediction (NEP) as a cross-modal generation paradigm within a decoupled Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture. By maintaining a shared lower trunk and parallel upper layers, GAS lets generation losses enrich the shared visual pathway with finer spatial precision and stronger visual retention while shielding the upper understanding layers from direct generation gradients. To maximize this synergy, we further construct highly correlated generation tasks that demand deep cognitive grounding rather than generic synthesis alone. Across model scales and training stages, GAS improves aggregate multimodal understanding, with its most reliable gains on perception and spatial comprehension. Crucially, because the auxiliary generation branch is discarded after training, these gains incur zero inference overhead. Extensive controlled comparisons and representation-level analyses further clarify when and why generation-guided training benefits understanding, and demonstrate the feasibility of generation-guided training as a practical route to stronger multimodal understanding.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12209
PDF
-
Instruction Alignment for Binary Code Representation Learning
2026-08-12 08:07:26Huaijin Wang, Shuai WangAbstract
Binary code representation learning is a fundamental problem in software security and reverse engineering. Existing methods mainly learn function-level embeddings that capture coarse-grained semantic relationships between binary functions, but they largely ignore fine-grained instruction-level correspondences. This limitation misses valuable supervision signals available from compiler debug information, which can support the learning of more accurate and interpretable binary code representations. We propose to leverage instruction alignment knowledge to further improve binary code representation learning. Our preliminary study reveals that models finetuned for function-level binary code similarity exhibit substantially better instruction alignment than their pre-trained model, suggesting a strong correlation between instruction alignment and function-level embedding quality. Motivated by this observation, we design a training approach that explicitly incorporates instruction alignment as an auxiliary training objective. Our experiments show that instruction alignment training improves retrieval accuracy and provides more discriminative signal for the model's similarity judgments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11766
PDF
-
Phoenix TTS: High-Fidelity Synthesis and Voice Conversion via Flow-Matching-Driven Speech Tokenization
2026-08-12 07:23:54Peijie Chen, Zhuanling Zha, Zhipeng Nie, Weijie Wu, Yiming Liu, Daiyu Huang, Junbo Li, Jun Fang, Naiqiang Tan, Hua Chai, Qingyang HongAbstract
In current zero-shot text-to-speech systems, conventional semantic tokenizers are typically optimized using supervised automatic speech recognition or self-supervised learning objectives. However, due to the inherent nature of speech, semantic and acoustic information cannot be completely decoupled, and ASR-based tokenizers discard acoustic details to focus on linguistic content; models relying on them usually struggle to achieve optimal speaker similarity. Furthermore, these tokenizers are optimized independently and lack direct supervision from downstream acoustic generation tasks. This isolated training creates a feature gap between the extracted discrete tokens and the continuous space required by acoustic models, fundamentally bottlenecking the upper bound of synthesis quality. To bridge this gap, we propose Phoenix TTS, a unified framework that tightly couples representation learning with generative acoustic modeling. Specifically, our speech tokenizer is optimized to reconstruct self-supervised features to maintain semantic richness, while simultaneously receiving direct supervision from a Flow Matching training loss. Through this joint training paradigm, the extracted discrete tokens successfully preserve essential semantic information and natively align with the feature space of the downstream Flow Matching model. Comprehensive evaluations highlight the efficiency and effectiveness of Phoenix TTS. Trained on 110K hours of data, the system achieves excellent speech intelligibility, yielding WER that consistently falls below that of ground-truth recordings. Simultaneously, it maintains robust zero-shot speaker similarity, rivaling or outperforming several prominent large-scale baselines. Furthermore, as an advantageous byproduct of this unified training, the learned tokenizer can be seamlessly adapted to zero-shot voice conversion tasks without requiring task-specific fine-tuning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11737
PDF
-
STAR: A Spatial-Topology Aware Routing Framework for Generalizable 3D Scene Understanding
2026-08-12 06:21:59Mingwei Xing, Xinliang Wang, Yifeng ShiAbstract
Constructing a unified 3D scene understanding model has long been hindered by the topological discrepancies across sensor modalities. While applying the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is a flexible approach for multi-domain 3D understanding, we observe that conventional feature-only MoE routers may underrepresent local sampling topology under semantic supervision, making expert allocation difficult when semantic consistency coexists with geometric heterogeneity. To overcome this challenge, we propose STAR (Spatial-Topology Aware Routing Framework). Specifically, we introduce a multi-attribute self-supervised pre-training branch, covering topological and textural variations, to anchor cross-domain structural priors. Building upon this, we design a domain-aware expert branch with two mechanisms: Domain-Spatial-Guided Routing (DSR), which captures local topological variations from spatial context, and Entropy-controlled Dynamic Allocation (EDA), which adjusts the number of activated experts according to routing uncertainty. Together, these branches combine stable cross-domain representation learning with adaptive expert allocation. Extensive experiments across various tasks, encompassing both indoor and outdoor scenes, demonstrate the effectiveness of STAR. It achieves 80.1% mIoU on the ScanNet validation set and 77.2% mIoU on S3DIS, consistently improving over strong baselines. Code is available at our project page (this https URL).
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11699
PDF
-
Gloss-Free Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset Sign Spotting
2026-08-11 18:31:57O\u{g}uz Akif T\"ufekcio\u{g}lu, Ezgi Ekin, Mustafa Kaan \c{C}evik, Hacer Yalim KelesAbstract
Sign-language research for resource-constrained languages is often limited by the cost of dense linguistic labels such as glosses, temporal boundaries, and sign order. Broadcast news offers a practical alternative by pairing continuous signing with spoken-language transcripts, but this supervision is weak since text and signing are loosely aligned. Morphologically rich languages such as Turkish add further difficulty, as the same lexical meaning can appear in many inflected forms while some derived forms should remain distinct. We study whether weak transcript-based supervision can pretrain a reusable sign encoder in this setting, where poor text normalization can fragment pseudo-gloss targets and weaken representation learning. Unlike prior pseudo-gloss pipelines designed mainly to improve translation, we test whether the pretrained encoder transfers as a reusable representation for cross-dataset sign spotting. We pretrain on TSL-News, a new Turkish broadcast corpus, using pseudo-gloss labels derived from transcripts rather than manual annotation, comparing rule-based morphological lemmatization with constrained LLM-assisted normalization over a fixed vocabulary. We evaluate the learned representations via cross-dataset sign spotting on a new TSL Spotting Benchmark built from the TSL Dictionary corpus. The LLM-assisted encoder raises top-5 temporal localization mean IoU from 0.235 to 0.465, with 56.2% of examples reaching an IoU of at least 0.50; a frequency analysis suggests this gain is not mainly driven by memorizing frequent pseudo-gloss labels. In a downstream translation check, the same pretraining improves BLEU-4 from 9.60 to 11.04 and ROUGE from 23.48 to 27.43. These results show that loosely aligned broadcast data can provide effective weak supervision for learning sign representations that capture both lexical content and temporal structure.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11332
PDF
-
Capturing Uncertainty in Human Motion for Representation Learning in Soccer
2026-08-11 17:59:10Yizhou Xu, Lars Bretzner, Tiesheng Wang, Atsuto MakiAbstract
This paper presents a self-supervised representation learning framework for understanding 3D skeleton-based human motion in soccer, using future motion prediction as the learning objective. Since human motion is inherently uncertain, accounting for multiple plausible futures is essential for capturing the underlying motion dynamics and learning effective representations. To this end, we introduce a conditioning module for motion prediction that models a probabilistic distribution over discretized future motions in 3D Euclidean space, learning multimodality with explicit supervision from future trajectories. Experiments on large-scale soccer player tracking data show that our approach substantially improves motion prediction accuracy. Moreover, the learned representations effectively transfer to multiple soccer downstream applications, demonstrating strong cross-task generalization.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11203
PDF
-
CLEAR: Class-wise Expert Aggregation with Structured Sampling for Long-Tailed Classification
2026-08-11 15:45:09Gawon LimAbstract
Long-tailed classification poses a reliability challenge because models trained on imbalanced data are unevenly reliable across frequent and underrepresented classes. While existing methods address imbalance through re-balancing, adjustment, representation learning, or multi-expert modeling, they rarely estimate which expert should be trusted for each class. This paper proposes CLEAR (Class-wise reLiability-aware Expert Aggregation for long-tailed Recognition), a modular ensemble framework for long-tailed classification. CLEAR generates diverse experts through threshold-based structured sampling while preserving the full label space, then estimates a class-wise trust score for each expert using a smoothed class-wise precision formulation. During inference, expert predictions are combined through class-wise generalized product-of-experts aggregation, allowing different experts to be emphasized for different classes. Experiments on CIFAR-100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and Places-LT across multiple backbones show that CLEAR achieves competitive overall accuracy and particularly strong few-shot performance. These results support class-wise expert reliability as a useful design principle for long-tailed ensemble learning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11287
PDF
-
DINO-A: Adapting Self-Distillation Vision Transformers to General Audio Representation Learning
2026-08-11 08:43:16Tomasz Radzikowski, Mateusz Modrzejewski, Przemys{\l}aw RokitaAbstract
We present DINO-A, an adaptation of self-distillation from vision to general audio representation learning. While DINO has become a canonical method in self-supervised vision and prior audio work has explored latent prediction (BYOL-A) and masked modeling (Audio-MAE, BEATs), no prior work has brought canonical DINO to general audio classification in the way BYOL-A brought BYOL. DINO-A retains DINO's multi-crop, EMA teacher, and high-dimensional projection, replacing only the input modality and augmentations with log-mel spectrograms and the BYOL-A v2 augmentation block. We pretrain three backbones, two Vision Transformers with 8x8 and 16x16 patches and a convolutional encoder, on FSD50K and evaluate them with linear probing on ESC-50, Speech Commands v2, UrbanSound8K, and GTZAN. Three findings characterize the resulting representations. Patch resolution within the Vision Transformer family has consistent effect on representation quality, with smaller patches winning across all four tasks. The choice between Vision Transformer and convolutional backbone interacts with task type: convolutional networks lead on speech while Vision Transformers lead on environmental sounds and music. Under identical pretraining and evaluation conditions, DINO-A and BYOL-A v2 differ by 11.96 percentage points on average, and we trace this difference to two mechanisms: the interaction between DINO's high-dimensional projection space and FSD50K's limited scale, and the additional cost of multi-crop augmentation, which DINO uses but BYOL-A v2 does not. The high-dimensional projection space, central to DINO's success in vision, becomes a liability at FSD50K scale.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10659
PDF
-
Beyond Dry References: Learning Relative Audio Effects Representations via Contrastive Distance Learning
2026-08-11 07:00:35Xinlu Liu, Huibin Lin, Weixing Wei, Zhenhai YanAbstract
Audio effects (Fx) representation learning plays a key role in intelligent music production, including automatic mixing and Fx style transfer. Existing methods typically rely on dry or nearly dry references for effect modeling, yet truly unprocessed audio is rarely available in practice, as real recordings inevitably reflect the microphone, room acoustics, and preceding signal processing. Instead of pursuing absolute effect encodings, we argue that the relative effect distance between audio signals is more meaningful for real-world music production. Motivated by this, we propose RelFx, a contrastive learning framework that learns relative effect transformations from general audio collections without requiring dry references during representation training. Our approach uses a dual-branch Siamese encoder equipped with cross-attention and differential gating fusion to infer the shared effect transformation from a reference clip and an effect-processed, content-related clip. We further propose an antisymmetric fusion variant for bidirectional effect encoding, such that swapping the input order directly produces a nearly sign-reversed embedding, a property not explored in earlier work. Moreover, our dry-reference-free formulation eliminates the reliance on dry multitrack datasets and enables training on effect-bearing audio. Experiments on Fx style transfer demonstrate state-of-the-art performance under the standard Fx-Encoder++ MUSDB18 evaluation protocol, consistently outperforming existing approaches across all four instrument categories.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10573
PDF
-
Rethinking Text-Based Image Retrieval in Specific Domain
2026-08-11 06:00:27Jingyang Tan, Sheng Yang, Yuanpeng Chen, Jian Wang, Nianjin Ye, Chen Xing, Lanpeng JiaAbstract
Driven by the rapid advancement of vision-language representation learning, Text-based Image Retrieval (TBIR) has made notable progress. However, existing benchmarks are predominantly constructed on an exclusive single-match assumption between query and images. While effective in general scenarios, this assumption fails to reflect practical system performance in specific domains (e.g., surveillance), where a single query often corresponds to multiple relevant candidate images. To address this limitation, we design a Domain-Specific Multi-Match Text-based Image Retrieval (DSMM-TBIR) data engine. Leveraging this engine, we construct Security Multi-Match TBIR (SecMM-TBIR), a benchmark comprising 50k surveillance images with 200 comprehensive queries. Furthermore, we observe that vanilla contrastive learning in specific domains suffers from severe false negatives, forcing the model to push apart semantically similar pairs and thus degrading retrieval performance. We propose the Semantic-Aware Fine-Tuning (SAFT) framework to address semantic compression in specific domains, which incorporates Semantic-Aware Soft-Label Supervision (SASS) and Intra-modal Structural Distillation (ISD) to establish a promising paradigm for domain-specific TBIR tasks. Experiments across diverse CLIP-like models demonstrate that SAFT yields an average mAP@20 gain of 7.8 points on SecMM-TBIR over standard image-text contrastive (ITC) fine-tuning, while also improving general-domain performance. The entire benchmark will be released to facilitate further research.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10524
PDF
-
Unlocking the Power of Medical Tabular Data via Semantic-Aware Multimodal Pre-training
2026-08-11 05:57:09Yingsheng Liu, Haiming Li, Jingmin Zhu, Jiajun Sun, Victoria Mar, Monika Janda, H. Peter Soyer, Zongyuan Ge, Zhen YuAbstract
While vision-language models dominate medical representation learning, unstructured text lacks the dense, quantitative diagnostic phenotypes inherent in structured clinical tables. However, existing multimodal pre-training methods underutilize this potential due to semantic-agnostic designs that treat tabular inputs as flat vectors and employ unstable continuous regression objectives. To overcome this, we propose a novel semantic-aware framework explicitly modeling the intrinsic two-dimensional structure of tabular data. First, addressing the inter-feature hierarchy of varying diagnostic importance, we introduce Importance-Aware Adaptive Masking to construct a label-free curriculum prioritizing salient features. Second, addressing the intra-feature continuity-discreteness duality, we propose a Soft-Label Discretized Module that replaces unstable numerical regression with stable distribution matching, thereby mathematically preserving ordinal relationships. Extensive experiments across large-scale dermatology (SLICE-3D, HOP) and ophthalmology (EyePACS) datasets establish a new state-of-the-art (SOTA), demonstrating exceptional robustness and cross-domain generalizability.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10522
PDF
-
Motion Artifact-Aware Self-Supervised Representation Learning for 3D Brain MRI Motion Artifact Reduction
2026-08-10 19:37:31Mojtaba Safari, Shansong Wang, Zach Eidex, Matthew Goette, Tonghe Wang, Zhen Tian, Xiaofeng YangAbstract
Patient motion remains a source of image degradation in brain MRI, leading to signal loss, blurring, and geometric distortion that compromise quantitative analysis. Existing deep learning methods for motion correction typically rely on paired clean-corrupted data or k-space acquisitions, which are rarely available in clinical settings. We propose SSRL-MAR, a motion artifact-aware unpaired representation learning framework for motion artifact reduction that requires neither paired training data nor explicit motion labels. SSRL-MAR employed a three-stage training strategy: (1) contrastive learning on 3D patches to extract motion representations by contrasting clean and synthetically corrupted images, (2) a motion artifact-aware synthesis network to generate motion artifacts from clean scans, and (3) a motion artifact-aware generator to restore clean volumes using the learned degrader for self-supervised supervision. On in-silico dataset, SSRL-MAR achieved PSNR 23.81dB, SSIM 91.55%, and NMSE 0.79%. On in-vivo MR-ART dataset, the pretrained model reduced motion distortion, and unsupervised domain adaptation further improved anatomical fidelity. Against a source-only supervised model trained on the same simulated pairs, SSRL-MAR improved PSNR by up to 2.0 dB on MR-ART after unsupervised domain adaptation, and remained within 0.25-0.47 dB of an oracle supervised model that requires real paired data unavailable in practice. At the milder motion level, volumetric error in structures such as the corpus callosum and ventricular system decreased by more than 50%, confirming improved neuroanatomical consistency. These results indicate that SSRL-MAR provides a robust and scalable image-domain solution for 3D brain MRI motion correction, enabling reliable structural quantification in large-scale neuroimaging studies without requiring prospectively acquired pairs or acquisition-specific calibration.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10170
PDF
