Classification
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Measuring Robustness and Efficiency in a Connectome-Constrained Fly Visual System Model: Linking an Adversarial and a Perceptual Illusion
2026-11-10 18:51:31Alexandre Garcia-Duran, Alejandro Rodriguez-Garcia, Manuel Molano-Maz\'on, Alexandre Hyafil, Srikanth Ramaswamy, Janne K. LappalainenAbstract
Biological visual systems compute reliably under tight metabolic and wiring constraints, whereas artificial vision systems consume far more energy and can be sensitive to adversarial perturbations. Whether networks with brain-like wiring are more robust at lower computational cost is unclear. We address this by benchmarking a task-optimized, continuous-time recurrent neural network of the fly visual system constrained by its synaptic connectome (FlyNet) against artificial neural networks. We compare it against CNNs, RAFT, and continuous-time recurrent neural networks without detailed connectome constraints (sCTRNN, CTRNN) on a collision-detection task within a differentiable 3D rendering pipeline. FlyNet is adversarially vulnerable but, relative to its compute, more robust to common video corruptions than RAFT, while using up to five orders of magnitude fewer FLOPs. The CTRNNs remain more robust than FlyNet across almost all tested perturbations, suggesting that connectome constraints benefit efficiency, through their low edge count, over robustness. Recurrence improves robustness to white-box attacks in RAFT and temporal context improves robustness to common corruptions. FlyNet's position and velocity representations degrade under adversarial textures but recover under counterfactual textures that restore correct classification while staying equally far from training, ruling out unfamiliar textures as the cause of failure. The reverse-phi illusion similarly disrupts these representations and inverts the same low-level motion statistic as the adversarial textures. Optimizing this input statistic alone, without access to the network, suffices to induce classification failure, attributing both perturbations to the same circuit vulnerability. Connectome-constrained models can thus surface adversarial failure mechanisms as testable hypotheses about biological perceptual vulnerabilities.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14498
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Pterodactyl: Pushing the Limits of Efficient Automated Translation Evaluation
2026-11-10 18:41:37Evelyn Y. Garland, Carola F. BergerAbstract
In this paper, we present 1020 Group's submission to the WMT26 shared task on automated quality evaluation. Our system, Pterodactyl, was engineered specifically for subtasks 2 and 3, that is, segment-level quality score prediction and the detection of error-free segments. Pterodactyl is a highly customizable, ultra-low cost system optimized for binary classification in translation triage and data curation. It is based on an LLM-as-a-judge approach, with prompt engineering and model selection guided by ROC analysis. We also developed several variants of Pterodactyl that were specifically adapted for subtasks 3.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14480
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Metric-Aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization for Explainable Deepfake Detection
2026-11-10 18:08:35Luka Dragar, Peter Peer, Vitomir \v{S}truc, Borut BatageljAbstract
Deepfake detectors are commonly evaluated on real/fake classification alone, but real-world applications require explanations of the visual evidence behind each prediction. Joint vision-language models struggle with authenticity assessment, producing "real" narratives for manipulated images. To address this, we propose a decoupled predict-then-explain pipeline as our submission to the ACM Multimedia 2026 Explainable Deepfake Detection Challenge, with methods trained and evaluated on the XPlainVerse benchmark. A vision-foundation-model ensemble first classifies the image, then a Qwen3-VL-8B model generates a decision-conditioned explanation of the visual evidence. For fake images, a second Qwen3-VL-8B compresses that text into a short non-expert summary without using the image. We further apply metric-aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize both explainers against the challenge criteria. Under matched conditions, GRPO raises complex BERTScore-F1 from 0.686 to 0.712 and also improves grounding (entity and evidence F1); our submission ranked first on complex BERTScore-F1 and seventh overall.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14436
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Causal Concept Explanations for Deep Neural Models
2026-11-10 17:50:15Josh Rountree, Pulkit Verma, Oswin So, Chuchu Fan, Julie A. ShahAbstract
Concept-based explanations in neural models are important for the development, certification, and adoption of autonomous systems. Yet, interpretability remains correlational. Without methods to guide and quantify causal relationships between explanations, a concept explanation can be provided without being necessary or sufficient for the observed output thereby appearing correct while misleading. We introduce Causal Concept Wrapper Network (CCW-Net), the first use of interventional mediation analysis from fields such as economics, medicine, and epidemiology as a training objective to align causal effects of concept-based explanations with a model's output. We further apply mediation analysis as an evaluation tool to quantify, per concept label combination, how much of any model's output is causally attributable to each concept explanation. As a training objective, CCW-Net shapes a model's concept representations such that they are both necessary and sufficient for the outputs they are credited with and independent of other concepts' contributions. Counterfactual concept representations anchor a set of causal alignment criteria: necessity, sufficiency, and independence. Necessity drives irrelevant concept effects toward zero, sufficiency ensures relevant concept representations fully reconstruct a model's output, and independence enforces the total effect decomposes linearly across concepts. We evaluate CCW-Net across aircraft control, driving, and image classification. CCW-Net provides a step toward concept-based explanations that are not merely interpretable, but quantifiably causal, supporting safer evaluation, certification, and deployment of transparent and trustworthy neural models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14407
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Dyship: Leveraging Acoustic Features For Speaker Relationship Classification From Dyadic Conversations
2026-11-10 15:53:43Kieran Sturges, Thomas Thebaud, Yaohan Guan, Najim DehakAbstract
We introduce DyShip, a framework for classifying speaker familiarity and kinship from dyadic conversations in the Seamless Interaction corpus. We compare five speech representations: spectrograms, MFCCs, self-supervised WavLM representations, x-vectors, and estimated articulatory movements. Spectral features perform best for familiarity classification, reaching an accuracy of 87.81%, while WavLM achieves the highest kinship accuracy of 85.17%. X-vectors and articulatory features yield weaker results on familiarity classifiaction, but shine for kinship classification, with an AUC of 0.909 for x-vectors. Most classifiers exceed previously reported human and audio language model scores on the same dataset. These findings highlight the potential of conventional acoustic features for relationship inference and motivate further investigation of the conversational cues captured by different representations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14241
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SpecValley: Aggregation as Spectral Valley in Dense Heterophilic Graphs
2026-11-10 15:01:42Christoph Jahn, Delvin Bacho, Urs Waldmann, Bastian GoldlueckeAbstract
Node classification in heterophilic graphs remains an open problem: aggregating over neighbourhoods can damp precisely the part of the signal that carries the labels. The field has answered with ever more expressive propagation operators, leaving the aggregation step that precedes them fixed by degree normalisation. However, degree normalisation acts as a spectral valley in its own right, attenuating a fixed middle band whose position at lambda equal 1 is set by the normalisation rather than by the data, exactly where the eigenvalues of dense graphs accumulate. We therefore begin with the representations rather than the propagation, in two stages: a learnable aggregation followed by an ordinary spectral filter. The first, SpecValley learns the position, sharpness and flank gains of the valley for every graph. We show formally how the aggregation operator and downstream filter interact. We establish that the response 1 minus lambda of degree normalisation vanishes exactly at that accumulation point. A spectral energy budget shows that what aggregation removes from a band, no linear spectral filter can recover. Crowding alone says nothing about the benefit. That is decided by how much label energy the valley removes, which we measure for every graph. SpecValley achieves strong results across heterophilic benchmarks, and a controlled ablation over aggregation operators and downstream filters attributes the gain to aggregation rather than the filter.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14176
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CroCoMAE: Cross-modal self-supervised collaborative representation learning for SAR-optical remote sensing data
2026-11-10 14:10:41Vito Recchia, Giuseppe Guarino, C\'assio Fraga Dantas, Giuseppina Andresini, Annalisa Appice, Dino IencoAbstract
Remote sensing increasingly captures the Earth's surface through complementary sensors such as SAR and optical, yet ground-truth annotations remain scarce, limiting supervised approaches. Self-supervised learning (SSL) addresses the label scarcity, and cross-modal SSL further exploits the complementarity between co-located sensors, but existing cross-modal frameworks align modalities mostly through global image-level representations or treat them as largely redundant, leaving their fine-grained complementary structure underexploited. We propose CroCoMAE, a cross-modal SSL framework for SAR-optical remote sensing that unifies contrastive learning and masked image modeling within a ViT-based architecture, operating at two complementary levels. At the image level, an intra-modality contrastive loss on the class token yields globally discriminative, augmentation-invariant representations. At the patch level, masked image modeling drives fine-grained per-modality representations, while a cross-modal contrastive objective aligns a shared subspace across SAR and optical patch tokens, leaving the complementary subspace unconstrained to retain modality-specific information. On two SAR-optical benchmarks covering scene classification and semantic segmentation, CroCoMAE improves over uni-modal SSL baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art cross-modal frameworks in most configurations, with gains in both single-modality and multi-modal evaluation across varying label regimes and the largest improvements on semantic segmentation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14124
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Obscured Wildfire Flame Detection by Spatio-temporal Analysis of Smoke Patterns Using Frame-wise Transformers
2026-11-10 13:37:13Uma Meleti, Abolfazl Razi, Fatemeh AfghahAbstract
In this paper, we propose a new paradigm in wildfire management for detecting both visible and obscured fire using Deep Learning (DL). The essence of our method is the joint spatial and temporal analysis of RGB videos, embracing the fact that temporal patterns of smoke motions in consecutive video frames can indicate obscured fire flames. This perspective contrasts the traditional approach of independently analyzing images and individual video frames. To this end, we propose a frame-wise transformer architecture that applies an attention mechanism between the consecutive frames while preserving spatial information within frames as opposed to regular attention mechanisms like the non-local block, which combines spatial and temporal information into a single vector. We also optimize the temporal pattern lengths under different spatial resolutions to achieve the highest performance while reducing the computational cost. To investigate the applicability of our method in aerial image processing, we applied it to a curated version of the FLAME2 dataset that includes dual-mode RGB/IR videos. The IR video feed is used to extract ground truth, while the model is trained only on RGB videos to maintain applicability to lowcost commercial drones (which are equipped only with regular cameras) and facilitate processing existing RGB-only datasets. Our proposed method achieves a Segmentation Foreground Dice score of 92.61%, an Object Detection Precision and Recall rate of 93.21% and 91.73%, and clip-level classification accuracy of 98.02%, respectively. We also investigated the efficacy and generalizability of our method through ablation study
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14074
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The BRIDGE dataset: paired brightfield whole-slide images of prostate core-needle biopsies in paraffin, after deparaffinization and H&E staining
2026-11-10 10:40:09Julia A. Mielcarz, Justyna Dur\'slewicz, Marek Zdrenka, Ahmad Abbadi, Martin Eklund, Mateusz Matusiak, {\L}ukasz Szylberg, Andrea CamilloniAbstract
Computational approaches are increasingly being explored to streamline histopathology workflows, including label-free methods that aim to reduce reliance on chemical staining. Among these, deep learning-based label-free virtual staining uses images of unstained tissue to computationally generate stained images. Despite growing interest, model development and validation remain constrained by the scarcity of paired, clinically annotated whole-slide imaging datasets. We present BRIDGE, a dataset of prostate core-needle biopsies collected at the Prof. Franciszek Lukaszczyk Oncology Centre in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The dataset comprises 869 glass slides from 169 patients, each digitized sequentially after sectioning, deparaffinization, and hematoxylin and eosin staining, yielding in total 2607 whole-slide images. The dataset supports the development and external validation of label-free virtual staining, virtual unstaining, image-registration and segmentation methods. Each slide is accompanied by a Gleason score, enabling downstream analyses of cancer classification and grading concordance. The stained images can be used independently for color normalization and cross-scanner robustness studies. All images are de-identified, distributed in their native scanner format and will be available through the BioImage Archive.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13883
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Towards Text-Only Remote Sensing Scene Classification via Semantic Proxy
2026-11-10 10:13:00Xianping Ma, Kunlin Wu, Xiaofeng Liu, Xiaokang Zhang, Yuanxin YeAbstract
Remote sensing scene classification (RSSC) is traditionally formulated as a vision-centric problem, where inference relies on rich visual representations extracted from images. In this work, we revisit this assumption by introducing text-only RSSC, a new problem setting that investigates whether remote sensing scenes can be recognized using only textual semantic representations. To enable this study, we propose SeProRS, which reformulates RSSC as a text-only classification task through semantic proxy generation. Specifically, a vision-language model (VLM) is first employed to convert remote sensing images into textual descriptions, termed semantic proxies, which are then encoded by a text embedding model for scene classification. This decoupled pipeline provides a unified and reproducible benchmark for evaluating text-only scene understanding. Furthermore, we investigate representative prompting strategies and proxy generators, and analyze their impact on classification performance, text embedding behavior, cross-generator transferability, and efficiency. Extensive experiments on three well-known RSSC datasets show that semantic proxies can preserve substantial discriminative information, while also revealing inherent limitations of purely text-based scene understanding. This paper does not aim to replace image-based RSSC, but instead establishes a new research direction by quantifying the feasibility and boundaries of semantic proxy-based scene recognition. The proposed benchmark and analysis provide a foundation for future research on efficient and modality-reduced remote sensing scene understanding. The source code and datasets will be accessible at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13851
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Satellite Pretraining Is Not One Thing: A Matched-Pair Study of Generic and Earth-Observation Foundation Models for Scene Classification
2026-11-10 10:10:29Sandarbh Agrawal, Rakshith Sathish, Ashwathi NambiarAbstract
Geospatial foundation models are pretrained on satellite and aerial imagery, but whether such an encoder beats a strong generic one for few-label land-use/land-cover mapping remains unclear, as prior comparisons rarely isolate the pretraining data. We study five matched pairs of Earth-observation (EO) and generic encoders sharing objective and architecture (DINO/SatDINO, DINOv3/DINOv3-SAT, MAE/SatMAE, MAE/Scale-MAE, CLIP/RemoteCLIP) within a benchmark of 14 frozen encoders on five RGB scene-classification datasets (0.06-30 m GSD). With native preprocessing, we evaluate k-NN, linear and attentive probes and image retrieval over six low-label splits, using paired per-image significance tests. EO pretraining is not uniformly helpful: on most datasets and metrics, it significantly improves three pairs (SatDINO, Scale-MAE, RemoteCLIP, the latter evaluated only on unseen datasets) and significantly hurts two (linear probe: DINOv3-SAT by up to 22.5 points, SatMAE by up to 8.8), with opposite outcomes even for two MAEs pretrained on the same fMoW-RGB imagery. These effects are robust to patch-token pooling and attentive probing, concentrate on small man-made objects, and are largest with 1-5% labels. Across encoders, the silhouette score of frozen embeddings predicts k-NN accuracy and retrieval mAP almost perfectly (Spearman $\rho \geq 0.96$ on four of five datasets). Pretraining on satellite imagery is thus not a reliable selection criterion; candidate checkpoints must be validated on target data.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13849
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DisasterAgent: An Evidence-Driven Agent for Verifiable Disaster Report Generation From Remote Sensing Imagery
2026-11-10 09:15:06Zhijian Li, Jiawei Song, Chao Ren, Yidan Zhang, Peijin Wang, Xian Sun, Kun FuAbstract
Remote sensing disaster assessment is moving from simple damage classification toward comprehensive report-level analysis. In this setting, responders need not only damage descriptions but also verifiable evidence to guide response and recovery. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) and tool-augmented agents offer strong multimodal reasoning and perception, but they struggle to provide the evidence required for high-stakes verification. To address these limitations, we propose DisasterAgent, an evidence-driven agent that uses a Perception-Augmentation-Generation workflow to generate verifiable disaster reports from bitemporal optical imagery. DisasterAgent first invokes a specialized vision expert toolkit in the perception phase to build a Spatiotemporal Perception Graph (STPG), serving as a structured memory to store and organize disaster-induced changes across space and time. Evidence-based Augmentation (EA) then extracts evidence from the STPG, attaching inline citations that form a closed evidence loop from each statement to the supporting visual evidence. Extensive experiments on the DisasterM3 and RSCC benchmarks demonstrate that DisasterAgent consistently outperforms general-domain VLMs, remote sensing-specialized models, and existing remote sensing agents. Notably, compared with the original model, it improves the average score for disaster report generation on DisasterM3 by 13.5\% and ST5-SCS on RSCC by 15.34\%, providing a more accurate and verifiable solution for disaster emergency response. The code will be available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13776
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Mixed Signals: Weight-Space Programming for EEG and ECG
2026-11-10 08:59:09Dara Varam, Taraneh Aminosharieh Najafi, David AtienzaAbstract
Weight-space programming allows language models to read a trained neural network's weights and edit them. This opens the door to ``training'' by reasoning rather than through gradient descent. Prior work has demonstrated its functionality and promise for game-playing networks and fixing specific failures in language models, even extending to diffusion models. In this work, we present its applicability to models trained on biosignal data, specifically EEG and ECG data. We show that frontier models are not only able to debug specific faults planted in biosignal-based models without being told what these faults are, but are even capable of writing all the weights of a network from scratch, given only the architecture, the task, and a minimal set of training subjects. In particular, in one set of experiments, a language model was able to match standard gradient-descent training using $6\times$ fewer training subjects, through reasoning alone and without any gradient descent step. Networks written by Claude Opus 5.5 also scored higher than classic hand-crafted EEG pipelines (alpha band power, and common spatial patterns with linear discriminant analysis) when built from the same 5 subjects. We also highlight some of the limitations, which include the inability of language models to improve already well-trained classification models, and their incapacity to reliably recognize, from the weights alone, the task a network was trained on. Overall, our results indicate that weight-space programming can be useful for small networks, such as those deployed on edge devices and wearables, but the concept still requires further investigation before it can be used in practice.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13758
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Do Language Models Feel the Sentiment? Investigating Emotion Vectors
2026-11-10 08:45:50Ali Hassan Khan, Saad Bin Ather, Muhammad Saif, Maryam Bashir, Hajra WaheedAbstract
Emotion vectors are directions in a language model's internal representations that are associated with emotional concepts. Prior work shows that these vectors can influence model behavior, but their role in sentiment classification remains unclear. This study investigates emotion directions in Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct. Eight directions extracted from GoEmotions are evaluated through sentiment probing, activation interventions, and supervised correction. Emotion-only probes achieve 88.66% and 90.70% accuracy on binary TweetEval. In exploratory matched-ablation experiments, raw emotion-space removal causes 2.39 and 1.10 percentage points more accuracy loss than matched isotropic random-subspace removal for 0.5B and 3B, respectively. All four TweetEval raw and denoised effects are significant after Holm adjustment across eight comparisons. An exploratory SST-2 extension shows smaller raw excess losses of 0.66 and 0.57 points, with no effects surviving Holm adjustment. Frozen sentiment-correction classifiers are also tested on 20,000 Amazon Polarity reviews. Emotion-based correction improves accuracy over uncorrected Qwen, but does not consistently outperform margin-only baselines. These results distinguish sentiment information available in model representations, the effects of changing those representations, and their practical value for classification. They do not establish a uniquely emotional mechanism.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13744
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Topological Dynamics Under Non-Stationary Supervision: Persistent Homology of Neural Network Weight Evolution
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We investigate how the persistent topology of neuron- weight point clouds evolves under stable and non-stationary supervision. An identical multilayer perceptron is trained on Fashion-MNIST with correct labels, a fixed random permutation of the training-label vector, or a fresh permutation every epoch. Five paired seeds share initialisation and minibatch order, yielding 15 models trained for 100 epochs. Raw and row-normalised incoming weight clouds are analysed with H0 and H1 Vietoris Rips persistence at 22 checkpoints. Correct-label models reach 89.39% mean true-label test accuracy; fixed-random models fit 67.94% of their assigned training targets without generalising to the original task. Correct-label models have descriptively greater time-averaged normalised fc3 H1 persistence than either random-label condition, but the configured exact comparisons do not reach conventional significance after Holm correction. Early condition classification achieves 60.0% mean balanced accuracy using topology, 66.7% using conventional diagnostics, and 60.0% using both. Thus, no incremental predictive improvement is demonstrated in this setting. The archive contains all 3,300 configured topology cases. Interpretation is limited by five seeds, a single architecture and dataset, 282 capped H1 distance comparisons, and deferred bottleneck analysis.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13701
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You Are What You Read: Indian Political News Media Bias Dataset for Hindi Language
2026-11-10 07:34:05Kushal Trivedi, Mayank Mahor, Dhruv Sanghvi, Roshni ChakrabortyAbstract
Media bias understanding and detection remains an under-researched problem for Indian context, specifically for Indic languages, such as, Hindi, which is widely spoken in India. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive, multi-annotator, explainable dataset consisting of 448 unique articles from four leading Indian news agencies publishing in Hindi. We focus on Hindi, the most spoken and an official language of India. The study of media bias is particularly relevant in the Indian context due to the country's linguistic diversity and large population, where the same event is often reported by multiple news agencies in different languages, thereby introducing scope for bias. The dataset comprises Hindi political news articles annotated by 14 experts and classified into four bias categories - selection bias, framing bias, clickbait bias and omission bias - when an article is identified as biased or unbiased. For each biased article, annotators also provide a textual explanation, enabling future semi-automated approaches to incorporate explainability when language models reason over the dataset. Cohen's Kappa scores were 0.81 for simple bias/no-bias classification reflecting strong inter-annotator agreement. For the multi-label task, the Cohen's Kappa values are 0.89, 0.75, 0.81, and 0.79 for clickbait, selection, framing, and omission biases, respectively, resulting in an average Kappa of 0.80, which also reflects strong agreement.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13686
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MouldIt: Data Efficiency of Multi-Task Temporal Representation Learning in Injection Moulding
2026-11-10 06:42:04Abdullah AyadAbstract
Smart industrial solutions that can address multiple tasks require models that understand the underlying processes. We examine representation learning for modeling the injection moulding process as an example of such solutions. We consider its data efficiency and multi-modal benefit compared to classical machine learning alternatives. To this end, we synthesize a process-informed dataset based on a real reference cycle of an Erlanger Träger part. We then introduce MouldIt, a temporal convolution and attention based variational autoencoder that reconstructs in-mould signals, while classifying parts as acceptable or as one of our synthetic failure modes. We evaluate MouldIt on two tasks, known-class classification and unknown-class detection, across nine dataset sizes in single-modal and multi-modal settings. We compare it with an accept-all baseline and the classical methods k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, random forests, and principal component analysis, which we adapt to support both tasks. MouldIt outperforms classical methods across both tasks from 4000 cycles in the single-modal setting and from 2000 cycles in the multi-modal setting. It achieves part sorting losses of 6.0 $\pm$ 0.7% and 1.0 $\pm$ 0.3% in the single-modal and multi-modal settings respectively, ranking first across all baselines and a combination of principal component analysis and random forests.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13646
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picoEmergencyNet : Attention-Enhanced Ultra-Small Deep Learning Model for Aerial Image Classification in Emergency Monitoring
2026-11-10 06:28:44Christos KyrkouAbstract
Real-time disaster recognition from aerial imagery requires deep learning models that operate under strict memory, compute, and latency constraints. While recent approaches achieve high accuracy, their computational cost limits deployment on resource-constrained UAV platforms. This work introduces picoEmergencyNet, an ultra-lightweight convolutional neural network designed for aerial image disaster classification. The proposed architecture combines depthwise dilated convolutions with efficient channel attention and channel shuffling to enable multi-scale feature extraction at minimal computational cost. picoEmergencyNet has 23k parameters and 7M FLOPs, requiring only 0.1 MB of model storage. Evaluated on the AIDER and AIDERv2 disaster datasets, it achieves up to 96.1% accuracy, matching or exceeding state-of-the-art lightweight models that are orders of magnitude larger. Deployment experiments on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin show that, without hardware-specific optimizations, picoEmergencyNet achieves 258 FPS on GPU and 46 FPS on CPU with a 7x lower activation memory footprint compared to competing models. These results demonstrate that careful architectural specialization, rather than model scaling, enables highly efficient and accurate TinyML-ready disaster recognition for real-time UAV-based emergency monitoring.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13638
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Earth Embeddings in Environmental Remote Sensing
2026-11-10 05:42:10Yuchi Ma, Jiaqi Yang, Mengyu Liang, Ivan Higuera-Mendieta, Caleb Robinson, Anthony Ortiz, Min Chen, David B. Lobell, Inbal Becker-Reshef, Juan M. Lavista FerresAbstract
Earth observations from satellite platforms have profoundly transformed research and applications across numerous domains. However, uneven observation coverage and frequent data gaps continue to limit their ability to capture Earth's surface dynamics. Moreover, processing multi-modal Earth observations requires substantial computational resources and sophisticated data harmonization frameworks, which may not be readily accessible to many remote sensing practitioners. Earth embeddings have emerged as promising solutions to these challenges. As general-purpose representations converted from multi-source Earth observations, Earth embeddings can support a wide range of downstream tasks with no requirement of task-specific feature design and preprocessing. In this study, we first introduce the theoretical foundations of Earth embeddings. Then, we review several representative Earth embedding products. We next examine the applications of Earth embeddings across six major domains of environmental remote sensing. Finally, we systematically assess the performance of Earth embeddings in four downstream tasks, including hyperspectral image classification, individual tree crown segmentation, crop yield prediction, and aboveground biomass mapping. Our review and case studies suggest that, despite several advantages over conventional Earth observation data, current Earth embeddings do not always outperform remote sensing imagery or hand-crafted features. Earth embeddings should not be viewed as a direct replacement for conventional EO data, but rather as representations that provide stable information across space and time. Remote sensing practitioners may consider evaluating Earth embeddings' suitability for specific tasks and using them strategically, rather than assuming superior performance by default.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13612
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CoMet: Context and Multiplicity Decomposition for Multimodal Uncertainty Estimation
2026-11-10 04:23:11Sanghyuk Chun, William Yang, Amaya Dharmasiri, Olga RussakovskyAbstract
Uncertainty estimation has been a long-standing challenge in AI models; it amounts to "knowing what you don't know," and metacognition is notoriously difficult even for humans (cf. the Dunning-Kruger effect). Although it is still far from solved even in simpler classification systems, tackling it in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is becoming increasingly important. Within MLLMs, uncertainty can stem from any of the diverse sources as well as from their relationships, and further can stem from the unbounded answers in the open-ended setting. To tackle the issues, we propose CoMet, an MLLM uncertainty estimation method by decomposing uncertainty into a context-specific term and a multiplicity-specific term. The former captures ambiguity induced by the given context (e.g., task or prompt), while the latter captures how many plausible answers determined by the context remain compatible with the given input. We train a lightweight post-hoc uncertainty module to estimate these quantities, which enables efficient uncertainty estimation without autoregressive answer generation or repeated sampling. Experiments on various open-ended multimodal benchmarks, hallucination detection, and multiple-choice visual question answering benchmarks show that CoMet consistently improves uncertainty estimation over existing baselines while remaining efficient in practice. Code is available at this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.32012
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