Disentangled representation learning aims to map independent factors of variation to independent representation components. On one hand, purely unsupervised approaches have proven successful on fully disentangled synthetic data, but fail to recover semantic factors from real data without strong inductive biases. On the other hand, supervised approaches are unstable and hard to scale to large attribute sets because they rely on adversarial objectives or auxiliary classifiers. We introduce \textsc{XFactors}, a weakly-supervised VAE framework that disentangles and provides explicit control over a chosen set of factors. Building on the Disentangled Information Bottleneck perspective, we decompose the representation into a residual subspace $\mathcal{S}$ and factor-specific subspaces $\mathcal{T}_1,\ldots,\mathcal{T}_K$ and a residual subspace $\mathcal{S}$. Each target factor is encoded in its assigned $\mathcal{T}_i$ through contrastive supervision: an InfoNCE loss pulls together latents sharing the same factor value and pushes apart mismatched pairs. In parallel, KL regularization imposes a Gaussian structure on both $\mathcal{S}$ and the aggregated factor subspaces, organizing the geometry without additional supervision for non-targeted factors and avoiding adversarial training and classifiers. Across multiple datasets, with constant hyperparameters, \textsc{XFactors} achieves state-of-the-art disentanglement scores and yields consistent qualitative factor alignment in the corresponding subspaces, enabling controlled factor swapping via latent replacement. We further demonstrate that our method scales correctly with increasing latent capacity and evaluate it on the real-world dataset CelebA. Our code is available at \href{this https URL}{this http URL}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21688
Learning transferable visuomotor imitation policies that generalize across diverse manipulation tasks and adapt rapidly to new tasks from only a handful of demonstrations remains challenging. Most modern policies are trained end-to-end to map observations directly to low-level actions, offering little explicit structure for reusing and recombining behaviors across tasks and making transfer data-inefficient under limited supervision. We propose SkillPlug, a plug-in framework that augments an existing visuomotor policy with a skill-conditioning module and mines a shared, transferable skill library from raw multi-task demonstrations. SkillPlug learns skills via self-supervised objectives that promote compact, reusable, and non-redundant behavior-level primitives, forming a task-shared prior for compositional control. After skill mining, we keep the learned skills fixed and specialize to unseen tasks by fine-tuning only lightweight router and action head, enabling efficient adaptation without full end-to-end retraining. We evaluate SkillPlug on two simulation benchmarks and on a real robot, and observe that the mined transferable skills consistently improve both multi-task performance and few-shot adaptation. Overall, SkillPlug offers a scalable way to mine reusable skills that improve data-efficient generalization in robotic manipulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08354
Background and Objective: Quantitative analysis of cell dynamics is central to modern biological research, providing critical insights into immune cell interactions, disease progression, and drug mechanisms. Automated cell tracking in time-lapse microscopy remains challenging due to noise, morphological variations, overlapping cells, and dynamic events such as divisions and fusions. Methods: We present ARGUS, a framework for Accelerated, Robust, General, and Unsupervised Cell Tracking Solutions. ARGUS combines adaptive cell detection, dense Farneback optical-flow prediction, frame-to-frame linear assignment, and a sequence-level tracklet-refinement step that reconnects trajectory fragments across short temporal gaps. Results: On publicly available Cell Tracking Challenge datasets, ARGUS achieved detection accuracy of 0.905-0.971 and tracking accuracy of 0.897-0.964, with runtimes within 1 minute (5-6 seconds for 3 frames). Conclusions: ARGUS is a modular, interpretable framework that can be adapted to different imaging modalities and biological applications without training data or GPU infrastructure. The implementation is publicly available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08297
Unsupervised constituency parsing aims to accurately induce latent tree structures from raw text alone. Recent neural parameterizations of PCFGs achieve strong performance in both supervised and unsupervised parsing, yet rely on high-capacity black-box networks for rule scoring -- as exemplified by the Neural PCFG family -- leaving rule probabilities without an interpretable mathematical form. In this paper, we propose Holographic Neural PCFG (Hol-PCFG), which recasts PCFG rule scoring as algebraic relation modeling among grammar-symbol embeddings. Hol-PCFG adapts Holographic Embeddings (Nickel et al., 2016), which scores knowledge-graph triples via circular correlation, to the left-child, right-child, and lexical-emission relations over torus-constrained embeddings, giving every rule probability a closed form that carries the intrinsic structure of grammar rules by construction. Hol-PCFG achieves state-of-the-art parsing performance in six languages while cutting rule-scoring parameters by 99.94% relative to the baseline model and training more stably. Additionally, we demonstrate that Hol-PCFG can parse Japanese directly from characters without any morphological segmentation, retaining nearly the same morpheme-level performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08063
Large language models exhibit recurring behavioural patterns -- personas -- that shape generalisation and safety, but we lack reliable tools for decomposing, measuring, and controlling them. Our central insight is to treat personas as positions in a space of behavioural traits, using the OCEAN framework to describe model personas in terms of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. We train low-rank adapters to amplify or suppress individual traits, and evaluate their effects using an LLM-judge calibrated against a human-validated panel, trait-specific multiple-choice benchmarks, and standard capability evaluations. Across six models from three families (4B-32B), we find that each adapter moves its target trait largely monotonically with scale, combines approximately additively with other adapters to construct mixed personas, and preserves performance on capability benchmarks at moderate scales. We further show that the induced trait axes affect safety-relevant behaviour in downstream evaluations: for example, moving along neuroticism and agreeableness axes affects frustration and sycophancy respectively. We also introduce an unsupervised psychometric pipeline that recovers four interpretable behavioural factors (tone, initiative, didacticism, epistemic caution) from model rollouts. Persona control can then be considered in terms of learning, scaling, and composing traits in weight space, providing a bridge between personality measurement, model editing, and safety.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07916
Large language models hallucinate most about entities they have never seen. We ask whether a model's activations betray entity familiarity before a single answer token is generated, and whether that signal predicts the factual reliability of the answers. On four Polish Bielik models (1.5B-11B parameters), we probe four entity domains (athletes, cities, writers, musicians), each with 42 well-known, 42 obscure-but-real, and 42 fabricated entities addressed by a one-sentence question (504 prompts per model). Two unsupervised, single-forward-pass dispersion measures over post-SwiGLU MLP activations, inverse participation ratio and spectral entropy, separate known from fabricated entities at AUROC 0.95-1.00 across all domains and scales; a supervised linear probe reaches 0.99-1.00. Both clear selection-aware permutation floors of about 0.70-0.74 (empirical p<=1e-3), survive held-out layer selection (0.93-0.99), and persist on real names (known vs. obscure-but-real: 0.96-1.00). The signal transfers across entity types (mean off-diagonal AUROC 0.92-0.99); a matched-template counterfactual shows the only large drops are template-caused, not entity-type effects, and the signal is diffuse across heads. This representational signal is already at ceiling at 1.5B, whereas behavioral factual reliability scales sharply: 0, 2, 10, and 19 of 42 known athletes are answered fully correctly by the 1.5B, 4.5B, 7B, and 11B models under a strict judge. Within known entities, separating correct from hallucinated answers is much harder (probe 0.93; dispersion no better than a first-token-entropy baseline). A five-sample semantic-entropy baseline reaches only 0.71-0.83 at 5x the inference cost. Despite this internal awareness, the models almost never abstain: an audit of 2,520 answers finds 2 refusals and 1 hedge. Entity familiarity and factual reliability are distinct phenomena on different scaling curves.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07670
Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to handle complex visual tasks that require consistent and fine-grained reasoning. Recent methods aim to train models to facilitate self-reflective reasoning, i.e., reviewing and improving the generated reasoning. However, they require large volumes of annotated data and lack explicit reflective behavior during test time. This work aims to bridge this gap through inspiration from neuroscience. The human brain exhibits efficient backward prediction, i.e., predicting which current states are likely to precede a given future state. In this work, we first verify that mainstream VLMs can perform backward prediction, similar to the human brain. Then, we propose Brain-inspired Unsupervised Self-reflection (BUS), a label-free training framework to enhance reflective reasoning capability in challenging image analysis. BUS enables VLMs to perform backward prediction and provide explicit learning signals on data without ground-truth labels. In this way, BUS eliminates reliance on annotated data while improving reasoning performance. Notably, BUS is compatible with popular fine-tuning methods, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Finally, extensive experiments on 8 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of BUS across a wide range of complex visual tasks. It achieves notable improvements over the base model while using only unlabeled training data. Our experimental findings validate that backward prediction capability is critical for VLM reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07361
In many realistic scenarios, large volumes of time series data are generated with limited or expensive annotations. This limitation makes supervised learning methods difficult to apply and leads to the use of unsupervised approaches capable of discovering meaningful structures directly from raw data. Clustering therefore plays a crucial role in organizing time series into groups that share similar temporal patterns, enabling exploratory analysis and downstream tasks without requiring manual labeling. However, existing deep clustering methods often struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies or rely on architectures with high computational cost. This paper introduces FMMVCC, a Mamba-based deep clustering framework for time series that leverages state space sequence modeling to efficiently learn temporal representations with linear complexity. Additionally, it utilizes multi-view self-supervised learning with temporal masking and augmentations. Experimental evaluation in 15 benchmark datasets proves that FMMVCC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving the best overall performance in 29 of 60 total metric evaluations and the highest average rank in all tested scenarios.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07258
Deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have shown strong performance in breast cancer diagnosis, particularly for classification tasks in mammography. However, domain shifts across multi-site datasets remain a challenge, especially when models are applied to unseen domains. In this work, we proposed a calcification classification framework to improve malignant versus benign breast disease classification across multi-site mammography datasets. The framework consisted of two components: (1) an unsupervised domain adaptation module based on style transfer models (AdaIN and CycleGAN) to generate vendor-specific and technique-specific training samples without additional annotations, and (2) a supervised classification module using Swin Transformer V2 as the backbone. We evaluated the proposed method on three datasets: cross-validation on OPTIMAM (National Health Service, United Kingdom; n=2994), followed by external validation on EMBED (Emory University; n=125), and Duke Calcification Dataset v1 (n=788). These datasets cover multiple vendors and include both full-field digital mammography and synthetic 2D images derived from digital breast tomosynthesis. The proposed framework improved cross-site performance for both EMBED (AUC 0.68 to 0.72) and the Duke Calcification Dataset (AUC 0.68 to 0.73). These findings indicate that domain adaptation can reduce domain shifts and improve the generalization for calcification classification across multi-site datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06549
Dependency parsing consists of finding a tree representation for a sequence. Unsupervised dependency parsing aims to develop parsing methods without a gold standard during model training. In human languages, an unsupervised parser can be evaluated because some gold standard is usually available or can be created. For other species, a gold standard is unknown. Thus one may conclude that it is impossible to determine the accuracy of an unsupervised parser and, consequently, dependency parsing is unfeasible in other species. However, here we apply recent advances in network science to demonstrate that the proportion of correct edges retrieved by a parser must be high for the sequences of vocalizations or gestures that non-human primates produce due to the fast decay of the sequence length distribution. In contrast, human language sequences lack that property. Therefore, evaluation without a gold standard is feasible in non-human primates but a hard problem in humans.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06542
The increasing adoption of end-to-end learning for autonomous driving introduces increased model complexity and opacity, raising the risk of learning undesired or erroneous behavior. In this work, we integrate unsupervised dictionary learning as a post hoc interpretability module within state-of-the-art driving models to decompose driving behavior into semantically meaningful concepts while demonstrating their causal influence on the model's driving decisions. We propose a stepwise framework for extracting and interpreting meaningful concepts from the end-to-end model and connecting them to the multifaceted model outputs, thereby revealing the underlying decision-making logic for the prediction of future trajectories. Furthermore, targeted interventions at the concept level allow us to manipulate and correct driving decisions, resulting in measurable improvements in overall driving performance. We thus demonstrate how interpretability can effectively be used to reduce model opacity, uncover erroneous behavior, and enable targeted mitigation, ultimately boosting model performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06328
Accurate long-term forecasting in complex systems is frequently compromised by dataset-level distribution shifts, where diverse underlying behavioral modes and evolving system states drive the dynamic multivariate time-series. While existing methods predominantly focus on local temporal shifts, they fail to explicitly model the global structural challenge where datasets are composites of distinct operational regimes. In this paper, we propose NEST, a specialized framework designed to model and recompose these evolving structures through a two-phase dense MoE architecture. NEST first facilitates structural specialization by partitioning the dataset into distinct operational regimes through unsupervised clustering in a principled moment-entropy space. We introduce a regime-oriented router mechanism that generates initial expert weights based on temporal content, subsequently refined through geometric modulation to regime centroids. Crucially, rather than acting as monolithic predictors, individual experts function as specialized kernels that capture regime-specific dynamics by evolving unique variate-attention patterns. Extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks, including heterogeneous network traffic and physical phenomena, demonstrate that NEST consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code and datasets are available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06607
Information Operations on social media networks have been identified as a significant threat to democracy and modern society, but they are challenging and expensive to detect by humans. Existing supervised IO detection methods fail to capture the dynamic nature of evolving IO user behavior, while existing unsupervised approaches rely on oversimplified assumptions of coordination among IO users that may not exist in practice. To overcome the limitations of existing methods, we formulate IO user detection as an anomaly detection problem and propose a novel unsupervised IO user detection approach called Temporal-bEhavior-laNguage Signals for information Operation Recognition (TENSOR), which leverages multimodal data, including temporal online user behavior, such as message posting activities, and the textual content of the messages. The motivation is that IO users are typically a very small fraction of all online users and have unique temporal behavioral and language patterns. Specifically, we train a Temporal Point Process (TPP) to capture abnormal temporal behavioral patterns of IO users because they are known to behave in a coordinated manner for IO campaigns. We further introduce a novel evidence function that converts LLM responses, which are generated from user post timelines, into quantitative scores to adjust the TPP outputs for better IO user detection. Experimental results show that TENSOR outperforms the baselines on five real-world IO datasets. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05855
Novel View Synthesis (NVS) methods, such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), rely heavily on the assumption of clean, multi-view consistent, posed input images. Real-world captures can violate this assumption due to screen-space artifacts-static occlusions fixed to the 2D image plane rather than to the 3D world. Common examples include physical sensor defects, environmental obstructions (such as rain or mud on the lens enclosure), capture obstructions (such as a thumb over the camera sensor or a dashboard visible in dashcam footage), and digital overlays (such as watermarks or UI elements). When present, they are erroneously baked into the 3D geometry as "floaters" or near-camera artifacts, degrading the quality of novel-view rendering. In this work, we propose SSA-3DGS, an unsupervised framework that jointly optimizes a 3D scene and a learnable 2D overlay to recover a clean 3D scene and the corrupting artifacts. By exploiting geometric consensus across views, our method effectively disentangles static artifacts from the 3D scene geometry without supervision or manual input. Across diverse synthetic corruptions and a self-captured real-world dataset, SSA-3DGS improves reconstruction fidelity by up to 9 dB PSNR over 3DGS trained on the same corrupted inputs, while faithfully preserving the corrupting artifact.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05598
This paper concerns the problem of unsupervised temporal action segmentation for long, untrimmed videos. Recent successful approaches follow a joint representation learning and clustering paradigm, where optimal transport (OT) is adopted to produce pseudo labels for learning frame representations. These approaches alternate between estimating pseudo labels using OT and optimizing the parameters with gradient descent during training, where OT is used for obtaining the final temporal action segmentation. A major limitation of these works is that they learn a deterministic embedding for frame representations. The iterative procedure between learning deterministic embeddings based on pseudo labels and estimating pseudo labels from the learned embedding can thus get quickly stuck in a local optimum. As an alternative, we thus propose to learn a probabilistic embedding for frame representations. The embeddings are modeled by Gaussian distributions and we sample from the distributions before estimating the pseudo labels. We evaluate our approach on several challenging temporal action segmentation datasets and achieve results comparable to, and in some cases, better than the state of the art. Compared to baselines with deterministic embeddings, our approach improves MoF up to 20.7\% and F1-score up to 19.0\%. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05263
While various works address reflective symmetry understanding in 3D data and images, pixel-level semantic left-right prediction of in-the-wild images remains challenging, due to certain difficulties including the lack of 3D information, occlusion, object pose variation, partiality, etc. In this work, we propose an unsupervised learning framework to tackle this challenge. Leveraging recent advances in vertex-wise semantic left-right understanding of 3D data, our unsupervised learning method jointly utilises 3D shape and image datasets to infer pixel-wise semantic left-right predictions in single-view images. In particular, we show that a medium-scale 3D shape dataset comprising mainly of human- and quadruped animal-like shapes, combined with diverse in-the-wild image data, are sufficient to achieve high-quality semantic left-right prediction in images, even for entirely unseen 3D object categories, such as cars or trains. Overall, our approach achieves superior performance in dense pixel-wise semantic left-right predictions on both rendered and in-the-wild image datasets when compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05006
Clandestine tunneling beneath oil and gas pipelines enables fuel theft, smuggling, and sabotage, yet conventional monitoring detects damage only after a pipeline has been compromised. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) can image such tunnels non-invasively, but manual radargram interpretation does not scale to continuous corridor surveillance, and supervised detectors require tunnel examples that are scarce in practice. We present a fully unsupervised detection pipeline trained exclusively on normal subsurface radargrams collected at a purpose-built field site containing three buried tunnels at 1.5-3 m depth. A denoising convolutional autoencoder learns the structure of anomaly-free ground; at inference, tunnels are flagged by reconstruction error. Our central contribution is a depth-restricted top-k anomaly score, which pools the highest reconstruction errors only within the depth band where tunnels can physically occur. This physically motivated rule raises AUC from 0.986 to 0.994 and cuts missed detections from 74 to 17 of 634 tunnel windows, relative to whole-image scoring, without any retraining or labels. We further show that the optimal top-k fraction interacts with the depth restriction - 1% pooling is best on full images, 5% once scoring is depth-restricted - and that spatial voting across overlapping survey windows helps weak per-image detectors but offers no benefit once the scoring rule is strong. The final system attains AUC 0.994, F1 0.975, recall 0.973, and precision 0.976 on 1,600 field test windows spanning 55 survey lines, at a 1.6% false-alarm rate, using no tunnel labels for training, scoring, or threshold calibration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04882
Unsupervised graph clustering is a fundamental technique for uncovering underlying semantic patterns in large-scale networks. Although Graph Contrastive Learning has demonstrated promising performance, existing methods often suffer from the "structural isolation" issue during mini-batch training, making it challenging to capture cohesive community structures that characterize the global topological distribution. To address these challenges, we propose SCISE, a Scalable unsupervised graph Clustering framework that preserves structural Integrity by synergizing community-aware sampling with constrained Structural Entropy. Specifically, we first introduce the Structural Entropy Community Constraint operator (SECC), which optimizes structural information within a constrained solution space to mitigate community fragmentation and enhance partition cohesion. Second, to prevent global information loss during batch training, we design a Community-Aware Sampling Expansion (CSampE) mechanism that incorporates the community context of target nodes into sampling batches, effectively breaking structural barriers and preserving topological integrity. Finally, we devise a Structural Contrastive Learning (StructCL) module that refines edge weights based on intra-batch structural similarity, guiding the encoder to learn representations in a higher-order structural space. Extensive experiments on six mainstream benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCISE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, with ablation studies and robustness analyses further validating its effectiveness and reliability for real-world large-scale graphs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05469
Interpretability methods aim to reveal the features represented inside large language models (LLMs). Many existing methods begin with labeled examples of a human-defined concept that may reflect human biases, and then identify how that concept is represented within the model, for example in its activation space or through other decomposition methods. We introduce \emph{Mining via Activation Geometry} (MAG), a simple unsupervised framework for extracting reasoning features from model activations by prepending the same natural-language instruction $Q$ to every input $p$, where $Q$ defines the reasoning feature of interest, such as ``Can this object be found in the desert?'' or ``Is this prompt malicious?'' We measure how the instruction changes the model's internal representation using $m(Q \mid p) - m(p)$ at a single readout point. We explore eight different MAGs. The extracted reasoning features predict the models' own world understanding and judgment, can be approximated into a single activation direction, we found that some features are more linearly represented and some less, this linear representation, which is vector steering, can change the LLMs' decisions through activation steering by injecting reasoning features. Finally, we use the same method to select the best training datasets for prompt-injection classifier probes: while similarity between ordinary activations is almost unrelated to downstream performance, RFD-based similarity achieves $94.7\%$ Top-1 and $100\%$ Top-2 accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04222
Market manipulation is the dubious practice of manipulating stock prices in order to make a quick profit, which truly degrades confidence on trading platforms. We implemented an unsupervised fraud-detection toolkit that begins with K-Means++ clustering to address this issue. A dataset of roughly one million financial transactions from 2012 to 2024 is used. In order to identify fraudulent trades and categorize them using market practice heuristic thresholds, the study suggests a clustering-based pipeline. The method highlights 2.02% of trades as suspicious where 51.10% clearly indicate spoofing, 0.10% indicate pump and dump, 0.55% indicate insider trading, 1.43% indicate a fake breakout, and 46.83% are unclassified. Despite the lack of ground truth, the model's performance is confirmed by a Silhouette Score of 0.561.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04184