Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) addresses the problem of training multiple agents that pursue collaborative, competitive, or mixed objectives. Prior work has investigated transfer learning between source and target domains in MARL; however, the majority of existing approaches impose the constraint that the dimensionalities of the observation space and the global state space must be identical across domains. In this paper, we introduce a method that explicitly accommodates mismatched state-space dimensionalities between source and target domains. The proposed approach, ASALT, incorporates both observation-level and state-level adapters that map the target-domain observations and global states into a shared embedding space, thereby enabling more effective transfer of knowledge across both actors and critics. These adapters can generate embeddings that support efficient strategy transfer across heterogeneous domains. Experimental results on multiple configurations in standard benchmark environments demonstrate that ASALT surpasses existing baselines in terms of sample efficiency and global return in cooperative settings, but its effectiveness depends on the degree of mismatch between source and target domains. Furthermore, our findings indicate that ASALT mitigates negative transfer, which frequently constitutes a major obstacle when transferring policies between domains with differing observation and action spaces.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24601
The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as open radio units (O-RUs) in 6G cellular systems presents a promising opportunity to achieve scalable and adaptive network coverage. However, optimizing UAV trajectories in dynamic and unfamiliar environments remains a critical challenge, particularly due to the need for extensive retraining in each new scenario. In this paper, we introduce a novel UAV trajectory optimization framework that integrates enhanced continual transfer learning within the O-RAN architecture. The proposed system maintains a library of pre-trained models and employs a model selection mechanism to identify and transfer knowledge from the most relevant environments, minimizing adaptation time and improving efficiency. When no sufficiently similar model is available, a fallback model empowered by continuous refinements ensures baseline performance. The framework leverages real-world city maps and ray tracing techniques to enhance learning reliability and improve trajectory planning. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model selection-based transfer learning approach reduces convergence time by 44% to 56% compared to retraining from scratch, and up to 40% compared to traditional transfer learning without model selection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24483
Bearing fault diagnosis faces critical challenges when dataset heterogeneity, operating condition variations, and limited labeled data occur simultaneously in industrial environments. Existing approaches address these issues in isolation and rely on implicit feature alignment, limiting effectiveness under concurrent challenges. This paper proposes a knowledge-guided two-stage transfer learning framework that employs a lightweight GPT-2-style Transformer with causal self-attention for hierarchical feature extraction from vibration signals, establishing explicit pathways where pre-trained encoder weights and fault prototype embeddings serve as knowledge carriers from multi-source pre-training to target adaptation. The framework addresses the dual-shift challenge through multi-source learning for generalizable representations, prototype-based knowledge modulation for target adaptation, and taxonomy-adaptive classification for seamless transfer across heterogeneous fault categories. Experimental validation on four real-world datasets demonstrates 92.61% average accuracy with only 10% labeled target data, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 17.24 percentage points, establishing a practical pathway toward cost-effective predictive maintenance in Industry 4.0 applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24459
While point cloud foundation models have significantly advanced point cloud video understanding, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods still suffer from two critical limitations: prohibitive annotation costs for large-scale point cloud datasets and severe memory bottlenecks. In this paper, we aim to mine richer supervision signals from existing data rather than blindly scaling datasets. A further key principle is that the memory footprint of fine-tuning must be drastically reduced compared to full fine-tuning, which remains elusive for current PEFT techniques. Driven by these challenges, we identify three core desiderata: data-, parameter-, and memory efficiency, and present PoinTriE, a unified framework that excels along all three dimensions. For pre-training, pseudo-motion trajectories are synthesized via rigid transformations, paired with text corpora and 2D projections derived from raw point clouds. We then propose a Geometric-Motion Duality Network optimized via multimodal contrastive learning, rigid rotation prediction, and motion distribution divergence to produce dense self-supervision. During fine-tuning, we freeze the pretrained backbone and only update a lightweight Spatio-temporal Side Network built with LoRA units. Equipped with a gradient flow masking strategy, PoinTriE simultaneously reduces memory consumption and parameter overhead. Extensive experiments confirm that PoinTriE establishes new state-of-the-art results on action recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.24175
This work investigates the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) for real-time monitoring in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) additive manufacturing. We developed a binary image classification framework for distinguishing normal and abnormal melt pool images using a balanced dataset of 1,200 images collected from Nickel superalloy 625 on the NIST AMMT platform. The study evaluates accuracy and inference time based on control requirements and hardware limitations of open-architecture LPBF machines. We benchmark three transfer learning architectures (ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, and MobileNetV2) against two Random Forest approaches: one trained on EfficientNetB0 feature embeddings (hybrid) and one trained on raw pixel features (baseline). Images are stratified into 80/20 train-test splits, with a further 90/10 validation split on the training set, and undergo standardized resizing, normalization, and label-preserving data augmentation to emulate realistic process variability. Each model is evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), along with training time, inference latency, and CPU & GPU usage to capture deployability constraints relevant to factory-floor monitoring. The hybrid EfficientNetB0-plus-Random Forest approach achieves the best performance on the held-out test set, with an F1 score of 0.9451, accuracy of 0.9458, and AUC of 0.9904, while maintaining sub-millisecond per-image inference (1.15 ms). In contrast, purely deep learning models exhibit significantly higher inference times with lower accuracy. These results demonstrate that combining pre-trained convolutional features with classical ensemble methods provides a robust, computationally efficient route to real-time melt pool anomaly detection in data-limited additive manufacturing environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23851
Deep Transfer Learning (DTL) allows for the efficient building of Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Systems (IFDS). On the other hand, DTL methods still heavily rely on large amounts of labelled data. Obtaining such an amount of data can be challenging when dealing with machines or structures faults. This document proposes a novel approach to the design of vibration-based IFDS using DTL in condition of strong data scarcity. A periodic multi-excitation level procedure leveraging intrinsic non-linearities of real-world systems is used to produce images that can be conveniently analysed by pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to diagnose faults. A new data visualization method and its augmentation technique are proposed in this paper to tackle the typical lack of data encountered during the design of IFDS. Experimental validation on a railway pantograph structure provides effective support for the proposed method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20323
We propose triangular consistency as a first-principled constraint for optical flow, which is agnostic to network architecture, supervision type, and dataset, and applies to both image-pair and multi-frame settings. This simple but powerful constraint is to compose two flows to induce a third flow and enforce consistency among the three. The composed flows may arise from (i) image pairs, yielding cycle consistency; (ii) multiple video frames, producing longer-range motion through temporal chaining; or (iii) image pairs combined with controlled synthetic transformations, which becomes data augmentation. This triangular consistency introduces negligible computational overhead and requires no additional annotations. Since it is derived directly from the geometry of optical flow, it does not rely on model-specific assumptions and serves as a ``universal'' plug-and-play component for optical flow training. Experiments show consistent improvement across supervised, unsupervised, and transfer learning settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19938
Transfer learning is widely used for low-resource text-to-speech. When the target corpus contains phonemes unseen in pre-training, the model must expand its phoneme inventory during fine-tuning; we call the process "phoneme addition." However, it remains unclear whether the pre-trained ability to generate seen phonemes contributes to this process. This study investigates phoneme addition in two settings: (1) a simulation setup using LLM-generated phoneme-controlled corpora that enables investigation without considering confounding factors, and (2) a real-speech cross-lingual transfer setup (English to Japanese) to validate whether the findings hold in practice. Experiments in both settings showed that while fine-tuning achieved higher naturalness than training from scratch, it required as much or more data to achieve comparable PER for new phonemes. These results indicate that pre-training mainly contributes to naturalness improvement, but offers limited benefit for phoneme addition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19792
Chinese dialects discrimination is a challenging natural language processing task due to scarce annotation resource. In this article, we develop a novel Chinese dialects discrimination framework with transfer learning and data augmentation (CDDTLDA) in order to overcome the shortage of resources. To be more specific, we first use a relatively larger Chinese dialects corpus to train a source-side automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Then, we adopt a simple but effective data augmentation method (i.e., speed, pitch, and noise disturbance) to augment the target-side low-resource Chinese dialects, and fine-tune another target ASR model based on the previous source-side ASR model. Meanwhile, the potential common semantic features between source-side and target-side ASR models can be captured by using self-attention mechanism. Finally, we extract the hidden semantic representation in the target ASR model to conduct Chinese dialects discrimination. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark Chinese dialects corpora.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18597
Policy models often assume that the relationship between a policy instrument and its outcome remains stable across institutional conditions. In adaptive socio-technical systems this assumption may fail: regulatory change can alter incentives, agents can respond strategically, and the mapping from policy variables to aggregate outcomes can change. This paper studies such regime change as a transfer-learning problem in adaptive multi-agent systems. A policy regime is represented as a learning problem induced by an observable input distribution and a target function mapping policy variables to outcomes. We compare a blank-slate learner that searches a flexible hypothesis class in the new regime with a transfer learner whose effective hypothesis class is restricted by structural knowledge from the previous regime. Transfer is beneficial when this restriction preserves the new target function while reducing effective complexity; it is harmful when the restriction excludes the new target and creates misspecification. A stylized emissions-regulation experimental environment and a dynamic ABM robustness experiment support the claim. When the target regime preserves an affine monotone tax-emissions relation, transfer improves empirical small-sample performance. When the target regime introduces a threshold break, the same transferred structure produces negative transfer: held-out error remains high, online prediction generates more mistakes, and repeated online streams show larger cumulative and final-window error under misspecification. The contribution is methodological: previous regulatory experience should be reused when it captures stable structural invariants, but treated cautiously when policy change alters the policy-outcome relationship.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09685
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead. Latent reasoning moves deliberation into continuous space, but existing methods mostly learn deterministic or reward-maximizing paths, lacking a principled way to allocate probability across trajectories with different correctness and costs. We propose Latent Thought Flow (LTF), which models reasoning as variable-length continuous trajectories and trains a sampler to match a reward-induced posterior over answer quality and computation cost. We instantiate this with a continuous GFlowNet using stochastic latent transitions. To handle sparse answer supervision, we introduce an Entropy-Weighted Subtrajectory Balance objective for intermediate rewards and a reference-prior regularizer to anchor exploration. Experiments under finetuning and transfer learning settings show that LTF outperforms explicit CoT and latent reasoning baselines, improving accuracy by 9.5% while reducing reasoning length by 27.2% on average compared with strong latent reasoning baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16222
The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15648
Accurate traffic flow prediction remains challenging in cross-city, data-scarce scenarios where limited historical data hinders model generalisation. The chaotic nature of traffic dynamics, complex spatio-temporal dependencies, and heterogeneous urban networks complicate few-shot learning across cities. Existing deep learning approaches either treat traffic as purely deterministic or lack mechanisms to model wave-like interference patterns essential for cross-regime traffic dynamics. To address these limitations, this paper proposes CIWI-CKT, a novel Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion framework with Cross-City Knowledge Transfer. Our framework introduces three core innovations: chaos-informed wave generation that extracts measurable chaos invariants and models traffic as adaptive wave components; meta-interference processing that captures wave interactions between support and query regimes while producing a predictability score for confidence estimation; and chaos-aware meta-learning that enables efficient cross-city knowledge transfer while preserving chaotic characteristics. We establish theoretical guarantees including chaos-to-wave stability, wave-induced dimension reduction, and meta-learning generalisation bounds. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that CIWI-CKT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art spatio-temporal graph learning, transfer learning, prompt-based, and few-shot methods, improving prediction accuracy while substantially reducing required training data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15642
Fine-tuning Transformer-based foundation models has become the dominant strategy for domain adaptation in audio and speech processing. To reduce the computational and memory costs of this process, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods have been widely explored. Meanwhile, Mamba, a recent state-space model, has emerged as a promising alternative to Transformers for sequence modeling. In this work, we present MambAdapter, a parameter-efficient transfer learning approach that integrates Mamba into low-rank bottleneck adapters. Our design combines parameter sharing across adapters with the injection of a lightweight Mamba module, enabling more effective modeling of audio features. We demonstrate that MambAdapter matches or outperforms strong PETL baselines on four audio classification tasks and five speech recognition languages, even when operating under reduced parameter budgets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15638
In this paper, we introduce DenseControl, a novel pipeline for generating dense crowd images. Specifically, DenseControl meticulously positions and sizes each generated instance to align precisely with the predefined coordinates and scales. Based on this, we further allow for control over the background, style, and attributes of instances. The motivation behind DenseControl stems from the observation of two main challenges in synthesizing crowd images: controlling signal embedding and maintaining topological integrity when imparting instance scale guidance. To address these, we first introduce the Isolated Object Embedding (IOE) map, a novel representation that facilitates spatial location control while mitigating the difficulties associated with learning projections for model. Secondly, we propose an Implicit Scale Embedding (ISE) strategy that seamlessly integrates with the IOE map to encode precise scale information. To further enhance the efficacy of combining ISE with the IOE map, we incorporate a Position Shortcut mechanism that enhances cross-attention to alleviate projection challenges. We evaluate DenseControl through two lenses: synthesis quality and applicability in latent applications. Experiments across different control conditions demonstrate DenseControl achieves state-of-the-art results in dense crowd image synthesis. Furthermore, we showcase applications in augmenting crowd analysis under data scarcity, transfer learning, and weather generalization scenes, to highlight the practical utility of DenseControl. The codebase will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15592
Electronic prior authorization workflows require FHIR Questionnaire items to carry LOINC codes, yet most items in the HL7 Da Vinci CDS-Library lack these bindings. We treat this as a retrieval problem: given a Questionnaire item's text, find the correct LOINC code in a pool of 97,314 active codes. We compare six methods (TF-IDF, frozen MiniLM, BioBERT, BioLORD, contrastively fine-tuned MiniLM, and a TF-IDF+GPT reranker) on a 54-item evaluation set spanning three query styles (natural question, medium, and terse). No single method wins on every metric. BioLORD, a frozen encoder pre-trained on biomedical ontology definitions, has the best top-rank accuracy (R@1 = 0.185, MRR = 0.246) despite seeing no task-specific data, while a contrastive fine-tune on raw LHC-Forms pairs takes R@5 (0.389) and R@10 (0.426). A distribution-shift ablation shows why the fine-tune in our main table is not the strongest one: adding GPT-generated paraphrases to the raw pairs drops R@5 from 0.389 to 0.296, so the augmented union underperforms raw-only training on every metric except R@1. Performance peaks at 5k training pairs. Error analysis on BioLORD's R@1 failures shows that wrong-specificity and ambiguous-text cases together account for 59% of errors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15449
Deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art image classification but face deployment challenges due to computational costs and energy demands. We propose a lightweight training strategy that adapts normalization layers of the model to the new domain and decouples feature extraction from classifier optimization, reducing overhead by precomputing features only once. A redesigned classifier head with margin-based weighted loss further minimizes ambiguity without end-to-end backpropagation. Evaluated across four CNN architectures (ResNet18, ResNet50, MobileNet, DenseNet121), three Transformer models (ViT, Swin and DeiT) and three medical datasets (Brain Cancer MRI, BreakHis and PatchCamelyon), our approach significantly reduces the required training time with only a marginal accuracy trade-off, often matching or surpassing baseline performance. This efficiency translates to reducing CO2 by orders of magnitude, offering a practical and environmentally sustainable solution for resource-constrained clinical or prototyping environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13043
Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15000
Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17504
Wave parameters in the nearshore are crucial for coastal engineering, shoreline protection, marine hazard assessment, and coastal management for climate resilience. Traditional monitoring systems like buoys and radar platforms offer accurate monitoring but can have high installation and maintenance expenses and limited spatial coverage. Passive ocean monitoring using video has been achieved by leveraging deep learning, however, many methods are not physically interpretable, feasible, and validated for oceanography. In thiswork, a Physics-Guided Deep Spatiotemporal Learning Framework for direct estimation of nearshore wave peak periods from passive coastal video stream is proposed. The framework combines automated temporal-variance based region-of-interest detection, multi-stage Sim-to-Real transfer learning, and physics-informed regularization to enhance the predictive accuracy and physical consistency. A variety of spatiotemporal architectures were assessed, such as transformer-based and recurrent-convolutional ones, alongside synthetic pretraining,silver-label adaptation, and expert fine-tuning. The results show that transformer-based architectures outperformed in terms of the accuracy of the instantaneous prediction, while lightweight recurrent-convolutional architectures achieved higher temporal stability and operational oceanographic skill. Ablation studies also demonstrated the benefits of physics-guided regularization in terms of trend-following consistency, and physically implausible predictions. Explainability auditing also helped to focus attention in hydrodynamically active surf-zone regions and showed good agreement with the physically derived wave propagation behavior. In general, the proposed framework shows the promise of physics-guided video-based deep learning systems for long-term coastal wave monitoring that are cost-efficient and operationally feasible.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13302