Represenation_Learning
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Hierarchical Interpretable Multitask Audio Representation Learning: An Analysis of Event-Scene Relationships through the Information Bottleneck
2026-10-15 08:54:06Claudia Montero-Ram\'irez, Alba Mart\'inez-Serrano, Carmen Pel\'aez-MorenoAbstract
Joint Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) and Audio Tagging (AT) models traditionally rely on unconstrained multihead architectures. However, this design ignores the natural hierarchical dependency between sounds and acoustic scenes. In this work, we investigate a hierarchical (sequential) conditioning paradigm that predicts scene categories directly from intermediate event probabilities. Through a large-scale empirical benchmark with 66 full training runs across three state-of-the-art backbones (PaSST, PANNs, and BEATs) and different loss-weighting settings (beta in [0.0, 1.0]), we show that hierarchical conditioning achieves competitive classification performance while altering multitask optimization dynamics. Unlike multihead baselines, which sequentially solve the easier ASC task before optimizing AT, the hierarchical architecture enables synchronized dual-task learning for specific loss-weighting settings (beta in [0.6, 0.9]). Furthermore, we propose a multi-perspective interpretability framework that combines an analysis of the information bottleneck, manifold geometry, and Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) on a Term-Frequency Inverse-Document-Frequency (TF-IDF) event representation, providing complementary insights into event-scene relationships. Our findings reveal that hierarchical conditioning systematically yields lower conditional entropy, higher mutual information, and superior latent cluster separability (higher Silhouette scores), establishing a more structured and semantically faithful intermediate feature space.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21520
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CoDeFont: One-Shot Font Generation via Multi-Scale Factor-Specific Representation Learning
2026-10-15 06:42:20Rejoy Chakraborty, Prasun Roy, Saumik Bhattacharya, Umapada PalAbstract
One-shot Font Generation (OFG) aims to synthesize a target glyph by transferring the stylistic characteristics of a single reference glyph while preserving the structure of the target character. However, accurately capturing font style from a single reference image remains challenging due to the limited stylistic information available in a single glyph, and this challenge is further amplified for complex scripts. We propose CoDeFont, a script-agnostic OFG framework that addresses this challenge through multi-level style-content factorization and progressive style-content reconciliation. CoDeFont independently aggregates complementary style and structural information across multiple spatial levels to obtain factor-specific representations, while a contrastive objective explicitly encourages separation between style and content embeddings. During reconstruction, the disentangled representations are progressively injected through multi-level style conditioning, enabling stylistic information to be incorporated at different decoding resolutions while preserving the underlying glyph structure. We evaluate CoDeFont on structurally distinct Bengali and Latin scripts across seen and unseen font styles. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses demonstrate consistent improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed framework for OFG across diverse writing systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21364
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Monotone Piecewise-Linear Harmonization of Multitemporal Multispectral Surface Reflectance With Unsupervised Deep Multiview Pseudoinvariant Features Learning
2026-10-15 03:37:51Lino Garda Denaro, Chia-Hsiang LinAbstract
Surface reflectance products derived from optical satellite may exhibit systematic inconsistencies across acquisition dates, because atmospheric correction is generally performed independently for each image. Such residual biases distort the temporal behavior of invariant ground targets and reduce the reliability of multitemporal surface reflectance analysis. This study proposes Deep Multitemporal Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (DeepMGCCA), an unsupervised deep multiview pseudoinvariant feature learning framework that integrates Deep Generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (GCCA) with Multivariate Alteration Detection (MAD) to identify deep-pseudoinvariant features (DIFs) for the removal of surface reflectance biases across multitemporal satellite observations. Unlike conventional MAD-based approaches that rely on linear GCCA, the proposed framework replaces date-specific linear projections with a shared convolutional encoder. The framework learns deep invariant features (DIFs) directly from pixel-weighted canonical variates via iterative reweighting strategy, while a reconstruction regularizer preserves surface reflectance information and prevents degenerate collapse from suppressing genuine temporal variability. Experiments were conducted on four annual Landsat-8/9 and Sentinel-2 acquisitions across four regions of interest (ROIs) to evaluate four DIF-based harmonization transforms. A monotone piecewise-linear transform derived from DIFs quantiles consistently achieved the largest bias reduction, lowering the between-date spectral angle by up to 2.54 and RMSE by 0.015, and raising PSNR by up to 4.04~dB. These findings demonstrate the potential of deep invariant feature learning for multitemporal surface reflectance bias removal while highlighting the importance of preserving physically meaningful temporal and spectral information during nonlinear representation learning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21183
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Generative Representation Learning for Scalable Latent Tokenization
2026-10-14 17:29:09Alan Baade, Kyle Sargent, Vincent Sitzmann, Eric Ryan Chan, Justin Johnson, Li Fei-Fei, Gordon WetzsteinAbstract
We introduce an approach for self-supervised representation learning designed to be used as a tokenizer for generative modeling. Our objective supervises a representation loss by factorizing the pointwise mutual information of the data, which we estimate by taking information differences between conditional predictions from a learned generative model. We justify our algorithm theoretically and empirically, demonstrating that our generative approach to representation learning avoids dimensional collapse and feature suppression in cases where commonly used methods like DINO and LeJEPA fail. Moreover, we show our representation learning technique is scalable; expending more compute leads to predictably better latent tokenization. For the first time, we perform a careful analysis of the combined flop efficiency of tokenizer and generative model and demonstrate that our approach is a compute-optimal improvement over direct diffusion for pixel-space generation, obtaining an FID-50K of 2.18 with JiT-L. Applied to ImageNet and the text-to-image dataset GPIC, we show tokenizer encoder scaling laws for diffusability, where extrapolating our approach achieves representations in 7x fewer FLOPs than DINOv2 on ImageNet and 8x fewer FLOPs than WebSSL on GPIC.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20533
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Learning Topology-Aware Representations for Mechanics-Relevant TPMS Metamaterials
2026-10-14 16:38:20Songlin Duan, Shuo Yang, Yujia Zheng, Tobin FilleterAbstract
Learning informative representations of mechanical Triply Periodic Minimal Surface (TPMS) metamaterials is important for mechanics analysis and structural design, yet existing methods have rarely explicitly supervised learned representations with information about global structural connectivity that is relevant to mechanical response. We propose a topology-aware representation learning framework that integrates persistent homology into a DMAE backbone to explicitly encode global structural connectivity. A persistence-guided masking strategy prioritizes patches associated with persistent topological features, while an auxiliary persistent-homology decoder encourages the latent representation to retain information about topological feature counts across connected components, tunnels, and voids. We evaluate the learned representations on two complementary TPMS datasets using family classification, mechanical-property classification, unsupervised clustering, and regression. Across the two datasets, our method demonstrates strong performance in both structural family and mechanical-property classification, improving family classification by up to 3.9% while achieving the best linear-probe performance. More notably, unsupervised property-clustering performance improves by up to 26.7% and 51.5% across the two datasets, while strong regression performance is retained with $R^2=0.993$. These results establish persistent topology as an effective inductive bias for representation learning of complex three-dimensional mechanical metamaterials.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20684
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Contrastive uncertainty learning for robust multi-structure segmentation in lower-pelvic MR
2026-10-14 14:23:02Bilal Sidiqi, Yipei Wang, Wen Yan, Shaheer U. Saeed, Daniel C. Alexander, Yipeng HuAbstract
Boundary delineation of anatomical structures in prostate MRI is often compromised by regional ambiguity. Automated segmentation methods relying on global overlap loss functions tend to be insensitive to surface deviations, leading to significant errors in ambiguous regions. Most existing uncertainty-aware methods treat uncertainty as a post-hoc quality indicator or prediction filter. We propose Contrastive Uncertainty Learning (CUL), a supervised framework that uses predictive uncertainty to directly guide representation learning. Using Monte Carlo Dropout, CUL identifies voxel-wise uncertainty and structures the embedding geometry accordingly: low-uncertainty, correctly predicted features form stable voxels while high-uncertainty or misclassified features are actively repelled, preventing feature collapse at difficult boundaries. We evaluate CUL on a 589-scan 3D prostate MRI multi-structure segmentation task (8 anatomical structures) using a ViT with UperNet decoder architecture. Average Dice ($83.38\%$) remains comparable to the baseline ($83.35\%$), while surface distance decreases significantly ($p<0.001$) across 6 of 8 anatomical structures. A hard-case analysis reveals a $22{\times}$ asymmetry between significantly improved and degraded cases ($18.8\%$ vs $0.9\%$). Ablation studies show that removing uncertainty-guided sample selection eliminates improvements for the transition zone, while replacing the contrastive objective with a boundary loss additionally removes bladder improvements, demonstrating that both uncertainty-guided sampling and the contrastive objective are essential for the observed gains. These findings demonstrate that the proposed uncertainty-guided representation learning is a useful mechanism for reducing the risk of extreme errors in safety-critical medical segmentation
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20251
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CoTL: Compact Token Learning for 3D Scene Representation
2026-10-14 13:12:53Han Liang, Sibo Wu, Anpei Chen, R\"udiger WestermannAbstract
We present CoTL, a framework that learns a compact set of tokens that preserves scene geometry and appearance from unposed multi-view images. Our encoder compresses the input images into small per-view sets of latent tokens that aggregate information across views to form a view-consistent scene representation. Each additional view expands the representation with only a small, resolution-independent set of tokens, allowing its capacity to grow with the available observations. To force this compact bottleneck to retain sufficient scene information, a query-based Gaussian decoder uses scene-independent queries to attend to the learned tokens and recover an explicit, renderable set of 3D Gaussian primitives. Novel-view rendering supervision trains the compact representation end to end through the reconstructed Gaussian scene. Experiments on RealEstate10K and ACID show that the resulting compact, unstructured token set supports competitive novel-view synthesis and can serve as the latent space of a generative model for 3D Gaussian scene generation. Together, these results show that 3D Gaussian reconstruction is an effective objective for compact scene representation learning and the learned token space provides a basis for broader downstream tasks in 3D vision.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18446
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Tactile-Guided Robot Learning: From Representation Learning to Foundation Models
2026-10-14 12:54:05Kiyanoush Nazari, Luchen Li, Haoshu Fang, Nima Fazeli, Zhibin Li, Fumiya Iida, Thomas George ThuruthelAbstract
Tactile sensing is becoming central to robust, adaptive, and dexterous robotic manipulation. Beyond its traditional role in contact detection and reactive control, touch is increasingly used to learn transferable representations, condition manipulation policies, and support embodied physical reasoning. Yet existing surveys largely emphasize tactile hardware and perception, leaving the rapid shift toward learning-based tactile manipulation insufficiently synthesized. This paper reviews tactile-guided skill learning from a learning-centric perspective, organized by the functional role of touch across the learning and control pipeline. We examine tactile representation and policy learning, tactile foundation models, predictive and adaptive control, and generalization across objects, tasks, sensors, embodiments, and simulation-to-real transfer. Across these directions, we identify common design principles and remaining challenges in learning transferable physical representations, integrating semantic reasoning with contact-level control, and scaling tactile learning across heterogeneous data and hardware. Finally, we outline emerging directions toward tactile foundation and world models that can predict, reason about, and adapt physical interactions. Together, this review characterizes the transition of touch from a task-specific feedback signal toward a core modality for general-purpose embodied intelligence. An accompanying database of the reviewed literature and associated resources is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20134
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Discriminative Score Function: Turning Pretrained Models into Functional Generative Priors
2026-10-14 08:04:30Junhoo Lee, Hyeonjin Kim, Sangbum Han, Nojun KwakAbstract
Discriminative models are trained with task-specific objectives such as classification, detection, or representation learning, yet their practical utility depends on generalizing beyond the training task to unseen samples from the same domain. This suggests that a discriminative model may retain an implicit trace of the data manifold beyond its task labels. We ask whether this trace can be exposed as a generative signal without task-specific guidance. We introduce the Discriminative Score Function (DSF), which extracts an image-space generative field from the loss-gradient geometry of a pretrained discriminative model. DSF provides a training-free update rule that moves images toward model-consistent visual regions without retraining or task-specific targets. We apply DSF to diverse pretrained discriminative models, including ResNet classifiers, DETR detectors, and DINOv2 ViT encoders. DSF generates unconditional images from noise and supports conditional guidance, editing, inpainting, and explanation through the same field. DSF-generated samples also provide effective zero-shot quantization calibration when real images or labels are unavailable, preserving feature geometry better than data-free calibration baselines. These results show that discriminative training leaves a generative functional signal for synthesis and calibration. Project page: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19743
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ONCship: A Large-Scale Underwater Acoustic Corpus for Ship Recognition
2026-10-14 07:48:19Zhe Cao, Jichao Zhang, Xiao-Lei ZhangAbstract
Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved underwater acoustic vessel recognition. However, existing publicly available datasets are typically limited in scale, hindering large-scale representation learning and downstream task evaluation. To address this limitation, we introduce ONCship, a large-scale underwater acoustic dataset comprising 4521 hours of curated recordings from Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) hydrophones and Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. We evaluate the proposed dataset across three tasks: self-supervised representation learning, vessel-type classification, and MMSI-Level Vessel Classification. Experiments on DeepShip and ShipsEar demonstrate the effectiveness of ONCship for acoustic representation learning, with joint pre-training on ONCship and AudioSet achieving a classification accuracy of 62.45% on DeepShip through linear probing. Furthermore, incorporating ONCship as auxiliary training data improves downstream vessel-type classification performance. Beyond conventional vessel-type classification, we further investigate MMSI-Level Vessel Classification, treating each vessel as a distinct identity. Experimental results show that models fine-tuned with different loss functions achieve Top-1 accuracies exceeding 53% and Top-5 accuracies approaching 69%, demonstrating the feasibility of distinguishing individual vessels through MMSI-Level Vessel Classification. Overall, ONCship provides a valuable resource for underwater acoustic representation learning and vessel recognition, while its rich vessel-level metadata enables further exploration of MMSI-Level Vessel Classification.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19722
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Learning Visual Speech Representations via Cross-Modal Distillation and Joint Face-Lip Modeling
2026-10-14 04:18:45Jing-Xuan Zhang, Genshun Wan, Jianqing Gao, Jia Pan, Yumei Zhang, Lichen ZhangAbstract
Lipreading remains challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of visual speech cues and their sensitivity to head pose and video resolution. In this work, we propose FLARE, a framework for robust visual speech representation learning via cross-modal distillation and joint face-lip modeling. FLARE leverages semantically rich Whisper representations as the acoustic teacher signal, converting them into discrete distillation targets through a random-projection quantizer and pretraining the model with a masked prediction objective. To capture complementary visual information, FLARE employs a dual-stream architecture that jointly processes lip region-of-interest (ROI) and full-face inputs, where the lip stream captures finegrained articulatory motion and the face stream encodes broader facial dynamics. During pretraining, auxiliary audio input is incorporated to facilitate cross-modal alignment, and modality dropout is applied to encourage robust visual-only representations. For downstream lipreading, FLARE serves as a visual encoder coupled with either a lightweight Transformer decoder or an LLM-based decoder. Evaluated on LRS2, LRS3, and the out-of-domain WildVSR benchmark, FLARE achieves strong lipreading performance, with word error rates of 11.7%, 13.2%, and 34.3%, respectively. A progressive design study confirms the contribution of each major component. Further analyses demonstrate that joint face-lip modeling improves robustness under degraded video resolution and large head pose variation, while yielding more phoneme-discriminative visual representations. Code and pretrained models are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19559
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STAMP as a topology-aware molecular language for fragment-level learning and editing
2026-10-13 14:13:38Yuxuan Ren, Jiatong Li, Ziqiao Meng, Yatao BianAbstract
Molecular fragments provide chemically meaningful units, but existing molecular languages rarely make their locations and connections explicit for editing. Here we introduce STAMP (Sequential Tree Attachment-based Motif-Preserving representation), a topology-aware molecular language that connects fragment-level representation learning with precise structural editing. STAMP separately encodes motif identity, attachment sites and tree topology, making fragments reusable across contexts and subtrees directly accessible. Learned representations capture motif similarity and recurring transformations, and lower activity-cliff prediction error on 23 of 30 targets versus a matched SMILES encoder. Compatible subtree operations support scaffold-preserving optimization, ranking first among six methods on 15 of 23 benchmark objectives. A deterministic compiler enables frozen language models to act on indexed fragments, improving molecular editing, optimization, transformation transfer and change identification by 9 to 56 percentage points over plain SMILES. Together, these results establish an executable molecular language in which learned chemical units remain directly operable during design.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18438
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A Controlled Evaluation of Curvature Inspired Scalar Feature Scaling for Domain Generalization
2026-10-13 11:56:18Sunny Gupta, Amit SethiAbstract
Domain-specific curvature is an appealing idea for domain generalization (DG), but curvature learning can denote substantially different computations. This paper evaluates one deliberately narrow implementation: the code calls it HyperDG, but it rescales Euclidean encoder features during training by learned positive scalars and uses an ordinary linear classifier on unscaled Euclidean features at inference. It does not implement a Lorentz or Poincaré representation, geodesic prediction, or a Sharpness-Aware Minimization inner loop. We audit the executed objective and evaluate six conditions on PACS, VLCS, Office Home, and TerraIncognita. The completed design contains 384 runs: six conditions, four held-out targets, and four run seeds per dataset. Checkpoints are selected using only the three source-validation environments. Inference first averages paired seed differences within each held-out target; targets, rather than 16 seed-by-target observations, are the per-dataset clusters. The full implementation's equal-dataset macro point estimate is 1.61 percentage points below native DomainBed ERM (95% clustered CI [-3.17, -0.04]). All four dataset point estimates favor ERM, but an exact four-dataset sign-flip test gives p = .125 and Holm-adjusted p = .250; we therefore claim no adjusted evidence of a difference. The cleaner domain-specificity contrast, separate learned source scales without their variance penalty versus one shared learned source scale, is -0.13 pp (95% CI [-0.53, 0.27]). Its 90% CI lies within a revision-stage $\pm 1$ pp smallest effect of practical interest (TOST p = .003), supporting equivalence only for the source-selected suite macro, not every dataset, target, or final-step endpoint. The study thus supplies a bounded negative result for this scalar training package; it does not test or refute genuine hyperbolic representation learning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18227
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HiSTOR: Structured Treatment-outcome Representation Learning for High-Dimensional Longitudinal Data
2026-10-13 05:17:38Chuanqi Lao, Junzhou Huang, Qiao LiuAbstract
Estimating potential outcomes under alternative treatment sequences is essential for personalized decision-making, but remains challenging with high-dimensional covariates and time-varying confounding. In this study, we propose HiSTOR (High-dimensional Structured Treatment-Outcome Representation), an end-to-end framework that integrates nonlinear dimension reduction with longitudinal counterfactual prediction. The central idea is to learn structured low-dimensional representations of both current patient states and evolving histories, according to their shared and distinct relationships with treatment assignment and outcomes. This extends latent-space covariate adjustment to longitudinal settings, jointly addressing covariate dimensionality and historical complexity. The resulting framework supports one-step and multi-step outcome prediction under specified treatment sequences. Experiments on CVSim and CancerSim demonstrate the superiority of HiSTOR across varying covariate dimensions, confounding strengths, and prediction horizons compared to state-of-the-art methods. To sum up, HiSTOR offers a unified approach to connecting high-dimensional covariate adjustment with longitudinal potential-outcome prediction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17739
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Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning Based Voice Conversion for Electrolaryngeal Speech Enhancement
2026-10-13 04:47:07Ding Ma, Jinyi Mi, Jiajun He, Kazuhiro Kobayashi, Naoki Nishio, Tomoki TodaAbstract
Electrolaryngeal (EL) speech suffers from severe acoustic mismatches with normal speech, resulting in degraded naturalness and intelligibility. These mismatches also make sequence-to-sequence voice conversion struggle to learn robust intermediate representations, hindering EL-speech-to-normal-speech conversion (EL2SP) performance. To address this, we propose a novel multimodal contrastive representation learning framework to 1) achieve richer multimodal-representation learning, and 2) facilitate the transferability of multimodal representations to speech-only EL2SP. First, EL speech and text representations are fused to learn multimodal representations for target speech generation, during which cross-modal contrastive learning is employed to encourage a semantically consistent speech--text representation space. Next, the fused representations are treated as a fixed target to guide speech-only representation learning through cross-stage contrastive learning, enabling multimodal knowledge to be transferred to the EL2SP task while preserving architectural and inference simplicity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms both the speech-only and multimodal-based baselines.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17716
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Morphology-aware deep learning predicts colorectal cancer survival from whole-slide images
2026-10-13 02:22:42Hikmat Khan, Metin N. Gurcan, Anil Parwani, Wendy L. Frankel, Wei Chen, Muhammad Khalid Khan NiaziAbstract
Background: Five-year survival prediction from hematoxylin-and-eosin whole-slide images could support risk stratification, but the task is weakly supervised, and the tissue morphologies carrying prognostic information remain incompletely characterized. Methods: We conducted a retrospective secondary analysis using TCGA-COAD/READ (n=562) for morphology-specific analysis, Alliance/ CALGB 89803 (n=424) for model development, and SurGen (n=218) for external evaluation. We propose MorphContrast, a morphology-aware contrastive multiple-instance learning framework that uses tissue labels as structural supervision for five-year survival prediction. MorphContrast combines gated-attention pooling with three auxiliary objectives: patch-level morphology labels define within-patient contrasts, outcome concordance or discordance defines cross-patient contrasts within matched morphologies, and diversity regularization discourages representational collapse. Morphology-matched patches from patients with discordant outcomes serve as hard negatives, encouraging prognostic discrimination within comparable histologic contexts. Results: Morphology-specific models show weak but distributed prognostic discrimination: adipose tissue achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.622, stroma achieves 0.604, and both perform comparably to tumor epithelium (0.601-0.605). On Alliance/CALGB 89803, the single model achieves an AUC of 0.642, while the post hoc ensemble reaches a pooled out-of-fold AUC of 0.70 and a risk-group hazard ratio of 3.79 (95% confidence interval: 2.55-5.63). On the external SurGen colon cancer cohort (n=218), the single model and ensemble achieve AUCs of 0.669 and 0.678, respectively. Conclusions: These findings support tissue morphology as structural supervision for outcome-aware representation learning in colorectal cancer prognosis.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17603
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RAN-JEPA: An Action-Conditioned World Model for Energy-efficient Mobile Network Control
2026-10-13 02:05:04Binghan Wu, Kai Zeng, Kai Yang, Ya-Qin Zhang, Joseph Sifakis, Ye OuyangAbstract
Operational mobile networks are rich in observations but poor in interventions: they continuously generate large volumes of passive telemetry, while controlled action--response trajectories remain comparatively scarce and costly to collect. This observation--intervention asymmetry is a central obstacle to building practical world models for RAN control. We address this problem with RAN-JEPA, an action-conditioned world model that separates representation learning from intervention learning. The model first learns a predictive latent representation from observation-only network data, adapts that representation to the target deployment domain, and then learns action-conditioned latent dynamics from controlled sleep/wake trajectories while keeping the encoder fixed. We evaluate RAN-JEPA using public operator performance data for pretraining and a real-equipment four-cell 5G testbed for domain adaptation, post-training, and control. Across four future 15-minute intervals, RAN-JEPA achieves lower action-conditioned prediction error than a GPT-2 world-model baseline and a mechanistic rule, while remaining close to a strong persistence reference. What-if evaluation further shows that the model produces distinct and coherent future trajectories under matched SLEEP and KEEP plans. In closed-loop control, RAN-JEPA consistently supports higher sleep ratios than the two baselines at comparable congestion cost. These results show that observation-first, action-conditioned learning can turn abundant passive telemetry and limited intervention data into a practical predictive model for energy-aware RAN control.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17584
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DTA-GT: Direction- and Topology-Aware Graph Transformer for Neural Network Representation Learning
2026-10-12 14:04:21Yuxiang Zeng, Kun Xie, Yang Wang, Jigang Wen, Xiaocan Li, Guangxing Zhang, Gaogang Xie, Jiannong CaoAbstract
Architecture attribute predictors reduce the cost of neural architecture search by estimating accuracy or latency from a small set of evaluated candidates. The key difficulty is that neural architectures are operation-labeled DAGs: edge direction defines computational flow, but existing predictors often treat direction as a local structural cue. We propose DTA-GT, a Direction- and Topology-Aware Graph Transformer based on encoder-wide directional consistency, which preserves directed computational semantics across node initialization, global spectral encoding, pairwise interaction, and feature update. DTA-GT realizes this principle with direction- and topology-aware node initialization, Magnetic Laplacian spectral encoding, direction-dual structural attention, and a Direction-Sensitive MoE-FFN. Across accuracy and latency prediction on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201, DTA-GT consistently outperforms representative sequence-, GNN-, Transformer-, and hybrid predictors under limited-budget settings. Ablations and Magnetic spectral controls show that the improvements come from coordinated direction-aware stages and edge-orientation-sensitive spectral information, while mechanistic diagnostics confirm that the modules exhibit the intended directional behavior. These results support encoder-wide directional consistency as an effective design principle for architecture DAG representation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16822
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Rescuing Points Trapped Inside Incorrect Decision Regions: A target for Evaluating and Improving Forward-Forward Learning
2026-10-12 08:04:37Alireza Rahmansetayesh, Amirhossein Yousefiramandi, Maxwell Spiridonov, Sumit Raut, Kent Ziti, Pierre BaldiAbstract
Forward-Forward learning replaces end-to-end backpropagation with local, layer-wise training objectives. Its variants are evaluated primarily by classification accuracy, often measured with linear probes trained on their representations. We show that this evaluation can over-credit the learning method: a linear probe on the representations of an untrained convolutional neural network already reaches accuracy well above chance. Moreover, a single accuracy value does not reveal which datapoints become correctly classified after training and which remain misclassified. To examine what learning contributes beyond the random, untrained baseline, we present an analysis methodology built on the Boundary Proximity Index (BPI), a multiclass margin normalized by a class-centroid reference. We apply our analysis to seven Forward-Forward variants and related layer-local methods and find that initially misclassified points near the probe's decision boundary generally have higher rescue rates than those farther inside incorrect decision regions. Rescue rates vary substantially across methods, with some correcting a substantial fraction of these deeply embedded points. Together, these analyses offer a way to evaluate representation learning beyond accuracy and identify the rescue of points far inside incorrect decision regions as a target for improving local learning methods.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16347
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World Modeling through Spectral Alignment
2026-10-11 08:05:40Holger Molin, William Peng, Marco Bagatella, Randall BalestrieroAbstract
How do we tell a world model what information to preserve? We study this question through the lens of spectral representation learning. We introduce SpecWM, a JEPA framework that explicitly specifies desired relationships between observations through a target similarity kernel and trains the encoder to reproduce those relationships in its embedding geometry. Different kernels provide different supervision, ranging from physical state information to a fully self-supervised temporal kernel requiring only the ordering of observations within trajectories. We characterize the global optima of the objective, establish conditions for linear recoverability and invariance to nuisance information, and connect temporal-kernel similarity to the behavioral successor measure under an idealized setting. Empirically, the choice of kernel strongly controls which physical quantities are recoverable from the representation. More importantly, temporal spectral alignment improves CEM planning success over LeWorldModel from 52% to 68% on OGBench Cube, 49% to 77% on OGBench Scene, and 29% to 51% on CALVIN. These results suggest that explicitly specifying representation geometry provides a simple way to steer what latent world models preserve for control.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15429
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