Event cameras have shown great potential for robust visual perception, yet scaling event representation learning remains challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale annotated event data. Pretrained image models provide scalable semantic supervision, but existing image-to-event methods rely on rigid pixel-wise or token-wise alignment that overlooks modality discrepancies in texture, density, and appearance, potentially causing semantic collapse and limiting transferability. To address this issue, we propose Hyper-RED, a simple, painless, and scalable image-to-event pretraining framework that transfers high-order semantic structures from images to events. Hyper-RED uses hypergraphs to model and align high-order semantic associations among multiple image and event tokens, enabling cross-modal knowledge transfer while accommodating modality-specific differences rather than enforcing rigid one-to-one correspondence. Specifically, given a paired event--image sample, Hyper-RED leverages DINOv3 to extract spatial token representations and constructs image, event, and cross-modal semantic hypergraphs, where each hyperedge connects multiple semantically correlated tokens. We further introduce a hypergraph relational distillation loss that imposes complementary intra- and cross-modal constraints, enabling the event encoder to inherit image-derived semantic organization while preserving local relational consistency and event-specific characteristics. Experiments on three tasks across five event datasets demonstrate consistent scaling from ViT-S to ViT-L and state-of-the-art performance (Fig.1). The code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16811
Large-scale pre-training has transformed representation learning in 2D vision, yet its transferability to 3D single object tracking (SOT) remains insufficiently understood. Directly fine-tuning self-supervised 3D encoders, such as masked autoencoders (MAE), often leads to sub-optimal adaptation because the reconstruction objective is not fully aligned with the spatial-temporal matching requirements of tracking. In this paper, we observe that this difficulty can be interpreted as a layer-wise transfer mismatch: shallow layers tend to preserve transferable geometric cues, while deeper layers become increasingly specialized to the reconstruction pretext task and are less suitable for downstream tracking. Based on this observation, we propose MAETrack, a lightweight adaptation framework for transferring pre-training MAE representations to 3D SOT. MAETrack includes Layer-Selective Initialization (LSI), which initializes only the shallow stages of the tracking backbone from pre-trained weights while re-initializing deeper stages, and Geometric Residual Gating (GRG), which reinforces structurally salient regions in the search BEV features before template-search fusion through residual spatial modulation. Extensive experiments on standard 3D SOT benchmarks show that MAETrack consistently improves upon vanilla fine-tuning baselines with limited computational overhead. More broadly, our results suggest that effective transfer from 3D reconstruction pre-training to 3D tracking is not merely a matter of partial fine-tuning, but depends on a tracking-oriented transfer principle that preserves shallow geometry while adapting deeper representations to the downstream objective.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16695
Traditional multimodal representation learning and generation are two stages: a contrastive or self-supervised visual encoder is trained first, followed by a separate downstream generative model. This setup bottlenecks generative performance behind frozen embeddings. To bridge this gap, we revisit joint multimodal representation learning and generation to produce linearly interpolatable embeddings that are directly consumable by generative decoders. We present FLAT (Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal representations), a representation pre-training framework that jointly optimizes a shared multimodal encoder alongside downstream text-to-image (T2I) and image-to-text (I2T) decoders. By combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross-modal generative objectives, FLAT ensures its representations function as both discriminative semantic descriptors and generative conditions. Architecturally, FLAT maps visual and textual inputs into a unified continuous 1D sequence space, applying nested dropout over prefix-K tokens to enable dynamic output lengths. A single pre-training stage allows FLAT to perform cross-modal retrieval and generation across variable prefix K, achieving a T2I GenEval score of 71.1. Task-specific fine-tuning aligns model performance with state-of-the-art baselines: 83.1 GenEval on T2I generation; 40.5 BLEU-4 and 138.6 CIDEr on MS-COCO image captioning; and Recall@5 scores of 86.8 (I2T) / 75.8 (T2I) on MS-COCO alongside 98.3 (I2T) / 93.6 (T2I) on Flickr30K. Finally, qualitative evaluations demonstrate that FLAT representations natively support linear interpolation, latent space arithmetic, and zero-shot composed retrieval.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16591
Molecular property prediction requires representations that generalize from limited labeled data to structurally novel compounds. Existing molecular pretraining methods often rely on a single view: graph-based approaches model atom-bond topology but provide limited fragment-level supervision, whereas fingerprint descriptors encode chemical patterns but are typically used as fixed auxiliary features. We propose HiFi-Mol, a multi-view framework that separately pretrains a hierarchical graph encoder and a contextualized fingerprint encoder before downstream integration. The graph branch uses fragment-aware masking with multi-resolution supervision to capture substructure-aware representations, while the fingerprint branch tokenizes active entries from seven fingerprint families and applies masked language modeling to learn contextualized embeddings. During fine-tuning, HiFi-Mol combines projected multi-resolution graph features with fingerprint embeddings for downstream prediction. Evaluated on MoleculeNet benchmarks under the scaffold split, HiFi-Mol achieves a 2.77% improvement in average ROC-AUC over the best baseline across eight classification tasks while maintaining competitive performance on three regression tasks. Further analyses reveal that fragment-aware masking improves graph representation quality, and classification results demonstrate dataset-dependent strengths of the individual graph and fingerprint variants, confirming that the two views provide complementary predictive signals.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15611
Urban region representation learning commonly combines heterogeneous data sources, such as mobility flows, points of interest, and land-use information, to support tasks including mobility analysis, public safety forecasting, and service demand estimation. Existing multi-view methods typically improve region embeddings by strengthening interactions across views. However, such methods often overlook view-specific regional structures and may propagate correlations induced by shared latent factors, which can reduce the stability of downstream predictions. To overcome this major limitation, we propose CURE, a confounder-aware framework for multi-view urban region representation learning. CURE first encodes each view with its regional graph structure, estimates a shared latent component, and then reduces its projected influence before cross-view interaction. A hierarchical graph-aware fusion module subsequently aggregates the residual view representations using local and global regional contexts Experiments on three real-world cities show that CURE improves predictive performance, remains robust under missing and noisy input views, and provides reliable cross-view integration through shared component separation and context-dependent view weighting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15305
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease in which early assessment remains challenging, particularly in low-resource settings where MRI is often unavailable. High-resolution ultrasound (HRUS) of the tongue offers a portable and low-cost alternative for evaluating bulbar involvement, but learning reliable diagnostic models is limited by small datasets and the difficulty of extracting robust representations from ultrasound alone. We propose AlignUS, a cross-modal knowledge distillation framework that transfers anatomical knowledge from MRI to a HRUS-based classifier while requiring only HRUS at inference time. The model combines classification loss, supervised contrastive learning, and feature-level distillation to align HRUS representations with MRI embeddings. AlignUS achieves a patient-level balanced accuracy of 0.958, macro-F1 of 0.963, and ROC-AUC of 0.990, aggregated across four patient-level cross-validation folds, with consistent improvements over HRUS baselines and cross-modal alternatives. These results demonstrate that MRI-derived supervision can substantially improve ultrasound-based ALS assessment while preserving low-cost, inference-time independence from MRI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15285
Procedural audio has emerged as a viable source for transferable audio representation learning, but its design principles remain this http URL revisit two questions: how a procedural source should be scaled, and whether training choices developed on natural audio should transfer unchanged to procedural this http URL a controlled source, we separate scale into formula-class coverage C and within-class rendering diversity this http URL with FDSL and AudioMAE show that these two forms of scale provide different benefits and depend on the learning formulation and downstream task. A matched AudioMAE study further shows that procedural audio favors low mask ratios (10%--25%), whereas AudioSet-28K favors 50%--75%. Shared-codebook analysis reveals lower patch diversity and stronger temporal predictability in procedural audio. These results motivate source-aware procedural pre-training, where source scaling and learning configuration are considered this http URL is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15067
Robots need touch to manipulate objects safely and reliably, as many properties, such as softness, texture, and contact stability, are hard to infer from vision alone. However, vision-based tactile sensors yield different observations of the same material due to variations in optics, elastomer properties, and illumination, leading to poor generalization when trained on a single or multiple sensors. We propose a language-guided distillation framework for learning sensor-robust tactile representations. Language encodes high-level semantic properties of touch (e.g., rough, soft, slippery) that remain invariant across sensing hardware, providing a natural sensor-agnostic supervisory signal. We construct a 39K-sample touch-language dataset with human-annotated material labels and train a tactile encoder to align sensor-specific tactile images with language embeddings in a shared semantic space. We evaluate our approach for few-shot learning and cross-sensor transfer and benchmark it on six existing tactile datasets. Our method achieves 95% accuracy in the 100-shot setting, improves cross-sensor transfer by an average of 13.3% accuracy, and yields up to 19% accuracy gains across six existing tactile datasets. These results demonstrate that language-guided distillation enables scalable and hardware-agnostic tactile representation learning. Code and dataset are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14783
Dance-to-music (D2M) generation aims to synthesize music that is rhythmically and stylistically aligned with dance videos. A key challenge arises from the semantic mismatch between sparse dance cues, such as rhythm and style, and the dense information required for music composition, including structure, instrumentation, and expressive dynamics. Existing methods typically rely on these sparse cues and supervise only the final audio output, resulting in poorly learned music representations and generated music with limited musicality and structural coherence. To address these issues, we propose Curriculum-guided Multi-scale representation Alignment with scale-aware Optimal Transport (CMA-OT), a novel paradigm that leverages an external music expert to provide hierarchical supervision for the generator's latent features, bridging the semantic gap and enhancing representation learning. To effectively incorporate hierarchical supervision, we introduce a curriculum-guided multi-scale learning strategy that progressively transfers musical knowledge from the expert to the music generator, enabling stable and effective representation learning. Moreover, to accommodate the semantic and structural variations across different expert scales and achieve fine-grained alignment under temporal mismatch, we propose a scale-aware optimal transport alignment mechanism, which models soft correspondences between hierarchical expert representations and the generator's latent features. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that CMA-OT achieves state-of-the-art performance in rhythmic synchronization, perceptual quality, and overall music generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13118
Cervical vertebral maturation (CVM) assessment plays a pivotal role in orthodontic diagnosis and determining the optimal timing of treatment, especially for pediatric patients. In this paper, we propose LM-PCVMNet, a novel deep learning framework for automatic pediatric CVM staging. Specifically, our method integrates vertebral anatomical landmark information, heatmap-guided feature modulation, and metadata-informed similarity modeling into a unified learning framework. We introduce a heatmap-guided feature modulation module that enhances feature extraction by leveraging landmark-centered heatmaps to highlight morphologically relevant vertebral regions. A vertebral landmark-prompting block is designed to incorporate anatomical geometry into the representation learning process. Furthermore, we develop a learnable metadata supervised contrastive loss that adaptively modulates positive-pair similarity based on metadata similarity, enabling the model to learn more biologically consistent and discriminative features. To facilitate further research in pediatric orthodontic treatment, we additionally release PCVM+. It contains 1800 lateral cephalometric radiographs from real-world patients aged 3-15 years, with expert-annotated CVM stages, 13 vertebral anatomical landmarks, and corresponding metadata. We perform comprehensive experiments on two datasets, and the results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively improving landmark localization and classification accuracy over existing models. Code and dataset will be available at this http URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16033
Dexterous manipulation requires coordinated multi-finger control and effective tactile feedback, yet learning these capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of large-scale real-world data and the difficulty of extracting effective representations from sparse tactile signals. We build a robot platform and teleoperation system to collect a 200-hour bimanual dexterous manipulation dataset with synchronized visual, tactile, and language annotations, comprising 10,576 trajectories across 65 tasks, 69.5% of which involve dexterous multi-finger manipulation. We further propose STAR, an integrated training recipe for vision-tactile-language-action (VTLA) models that addresses the spatial, temporal, and informational sparsity of tactile signals through visual-tactile joint pre-training, sparse-global tactile token representation, and sparse future tactile prediction. Trained on this dataset, STAR achieves a 61% average success rate across four real-world tasks with 100 post-training trajectories per task, demonstrating dexterous performance under task-specific post-training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12549
Skeleton-based action recognition can support automated tracking of physiotherapy exercises, particularly in remote rehabilitation settings where continuous in-person supervision is impractical. However, most existing methods are developed for large-scale daily-action benchmarks rather than rehabilitation scenarios. Public rehabilitation exercise datasets are typically small, with only subtle kinematic differences between exercise classes. For participants with motor impairments, exercise execution may also deviate from standard movement patterns in amplitude, speed, and coordination, increasing intra-class variability and making reliable recognition more difficult for skeleton-based models. We propose PhysioAI, a clinical knowledge-guided semantic supervision framework that injects structured physiotherapy knowledge into skeleton representation learning. PhysioAI combines graph-based spatiotemporal modelling of human movement with training-time semantic anchors derived from a structured Clinical Knowledge Dictionary (CKD). The CKD descriptions are encoded using a frozen Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model and projected into an anchor space, where they provide class-specific semantic targets for skeleton representation learning. The resulting CKD-derived anchors are used only during skeleton-model training; inference requires only skeleton inputs. Under subject-disjoint evaluation, PhysioAI achieves $99.03\pm1.34\%$ on KiMoRe Overall, $94.64\pm7.36\%$ on the Hard-67 stress test, and $87.44\pm7.69\%$ on UI-PRMD Overall. These results exceed the strongest comparator for each endpoint by $0.27$, $2.87$, and $1.33$ percentage points (pp), respectively. These findings demonstrate that structured clinical knowledge can serve as an effective source of training-time supervision for physiotherapy action recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12491
Multimodal stroke recurrence prediction requires effective integration of heterogeneous clinical and imaging data, yet modality imbalance often causes models to over-rely on dominant modalities and underutilize complementary information. While self-supervised pretraining and selective parameter freezing are commonly employed to improve representation learning and fine-tuning stability, their effect on modality contributions and cross-modal behavior in multimodal medical models remains largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate whether image pretraining on 3D CTA scans reduces modality imbalance and improves cross-modal integration for stroke recurrence prediction, a clinically critical task we recently addressed. To this end, two multimodal neural networks are pretrained in a self-supervised manner and subsequently fine-tuned using two distinct freezing strategies. Their performance and modality utilization are compared against both the baseline model from our previous work and models trained entirely from scratch in this study. Our results demonstrate that self-supervised pretraining enables more effective utilization of the multimodal image-tabular dataset, outperforming both the prior baseline and all non-pretrained models. Notably, the best-performing Vision Transformer based neural network successfully overcomes unimodal collapse. Synergy analysis reveals significant interactions between vision and both gender and CHD, suggesting clinically relevant patterns for stroke recurrence. Overall, our findings demonstrate that self-supervised pretraining and strategic fine-tuning support more balanced modality utilization and enable meaningful cross-modal interactions. Code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22271
Multimodal brain state decoding has largely focused on fusing paired modalities for prediction, but has rarely explored how their correspondence can be further exploited to enrich training data and improve multimodal representation learning. To address this gap, we propose CoMA-DiT, a bidirectional cross-modal Diffusion Transformer for latent augmentation that treats paired modalities as sources of mutual generative supervision rather than merely as inputs to be fused. CoMA-DiT conditions velocity prediction on the paired modality through cross-modal attention and adaptively injects the resulting variation via a reliability-gated residual mechanism. Experiments on multimodal auditory attention decoding and emotion recognition showed that CoMA-DiT consistently outperformed 20 representative baselines, achieving absolute gains of 4.28% and 6.70% in accuracy and macro-F1 over the no-augmentation baseline, respectively. Extensive ablation, sensitivity, visualization, and interpretability analyses further demonstrated its robustness, generalizability, and ability to capture functionally relevant cross-modal interactions. These findings support a broader view of multimodal learning: Paired modalities can serve not only as inputs for fusion but also as supervision sources that augment one another.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11341
The human brain folds in utero, primarily during late gestation. Shortly after birth, cortical folding patterns are established and remain stable thereafter, making them promising early neurodevelopmental markers. Yet it is unclear whether the representations given by current neuroimaging foundation models capture cortical folding variability. Here, we introduce Champollion, a self-supervised learning framework that learns interpretable local representations of cortical folding from structural MRI. Optimized on representative folding-related tasks, Champollion accurately captures known folding patterns across cortical regions and external datasets. In a comprehensive benchmark, it consistently outperforms neuroimaging and general-purpose foundation models. Furthermore, Champollion reveals richer genetic associations than conventional morphometric descriptors and identifies localized folding signatures associated with incomplete hippocampal inversion, prematurity, and maternal smoking. These results establish cortical folding as a rich and largely untapped source of neurodevelopmental information, and Champollion provides a unified framework for discovering, localizing and interpreting long lasting cortical folding signatures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05438
Erasing concept-specific information from representations has been proven useful for mitigating bias or interpreting model decisions. The joint objective is to transform the original representations such that the target concept becomes unpredictable, while maximally preserving concept-unrelated information. In this work, we revisit the optimal bounds of concept erasure to derive a novel class of erasure functions that naturally induce a deterministic, dual counterfactual mapping. Bridging the gap between theoretical optimality and practical representation learning, we design an implementation that imposes a translational bias on counterfactual trajectories - a constraint that aligns with how many concepts geometrically manifest in modern language models. Our framework enables seamless navigation between concept erasure and counterfactual generation. We empirically demonstrate its efficacy in improving downstream algorithmic fairness and generating counterfactual texts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11253
Science-inspired vision models show that explicit propagation dynamics can provide structured and interpretable alternatives to conventional token mixing. Existing formulations, however, typically construct and adapt visual propagation within a particular dynamical family, while visual representations can require substantially different spatial interactions across samples, channels, and network stages. We explore cross-regime adaptive propagation and introduce TailProp, a hierarchical vision backbone built upon the Tail Propagation Operator (TPO). TPO uses Gaussian and Cauchy stable-process propagators as complementary bases with rapidly decaying and heavy-tailed spatial influence, and predicts a content-conditioned channel-wise coefficient to adaptively combine them. Because this coefficient is spatially shared, the two responses are fused directly in the DCT domain with a single DCT/IDCT pair, yielding $O(N^{1.5})$ spatial mixing for square feature maps with $N=HW$ and fixed channel width. Across image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, robustness, and cross-backbone restoration, TailProp consistently outperforms matched propagation baselines; TailProp-B reaches 84.4% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, 50.3/44.8 box/mask AP under the 3x Mask R-CNN schedule, and 50.8% mIoU on ADE20K. Controlled ablations further show that these gains are not explained by single-basis propagation, an additional same-family branch, or within-family adaptive order alone, supporting complementary two-basis propagation as an effective design principle for visual representation learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11081
Due to the proliferation of vehicle trajectory data enabled by advanced sensing technologies, path representation learning has become a pivotal task in intelligent transportation systems. Although existing self-supervised approaches have achieved promising performance, their dependence on deterministic contrastive learning paradigms and handcrafted view augmentation strategies inherently restricts their cross-scenario generalization capabilities. To address these limitations, we present DGCPath, an innovative Distribution-aware Generative Contrastive learning framework for Path representation. This framework establishes a synergistic connection between generative modeling and distributional contrastive learning, enabling the acquisition of robust and transferable feature embeddings. Specifically, our framework incorporates: (1) a diffusion-based view generator that autonomously produces semantically coherent yet diverse trajectory views from Gaussian noise; (2) a variational contrastive mechanism that enforces latent feature alignment at the distribution level, transcending conventional instance-wise consistency; and (3) a novel generative cross-supervision module that reinforces view-level consistency through cross-view reconstruction learning. Comprehensive evaluations on three real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate that DGCPath outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on two distinct downstream tasks, validating its enhanced generalization capability and representation effectiveness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07316
Many emerging video language modeling tasks require systems to move beyond clip-level abstraction and model visual content as it unfolds over extended time horizons. However, most existing video datasets rely on coarse or sparsely aligned supervision, which compresses temporal variation and limits the ability of models to learn reusable representations of continuous visual dynamics. We introduce Kairos, a video dataset for video-language modeling with time-resolved annotations. Kairos consists of long-duration videos, ranging from ten minutes to half an hour, annotated with fine-grained temporal alignment. The annotations capture ongoing actions, entity appearances and attributes, interactions, and evolving contextual cues along the video timeline. This time-resolved structure supports fine-grained evaluation, long-range modeling and reasoning, instruction data construction, representation learning, and video generation. Kairos provides a general-purpose foundation for modeling visual experiences over time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08755
Recent multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems achieve high accuracy through interaction-heavy cross-modal transformers, but their computational cost limits deployment in latency-sensitive and resource-constrained surveillance systems. To address this challenge, we propose RAFM_SER++, a lightweight multimodal SER framework featuring an asymmetric Residual Attention Fusion Mechanism (RAFM). Rather than relying on computationally expensive bidirectional interactions, RAFM injects affective speech cues into semantic text representations through a one-directional residual attention pathway. Combined with a BYOL-inspired cross-modal alignment objective and attention-guided pooling, the proposed framework improves multimodal representation learning while maintaining low computational overhead. Experiments on the IEMOCAP and ESD benchmarks demonstrate that RAFM_SER++ consistently outperforms the HuBERT-Base baseline and achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared with the state-of-the-art MemoCMT. Specifically, RAFM_SER++ reduces trainable parameters by more than 60%, achieves faster inference (79.60 it/s), and attains BACC scores of 81.10% on IEMOCAP and 95.39% on ESD. These results indicate that lightweight asymmetric multimodal fusion is an effective alternative to interaction-heavy cross-modal transformers for real-time surveillance applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07409