Automated fish feeding intensity assessment (FFIA) is important for precision aquaculture and feed cost optimization. However, unimodal methods are vulnerable to acoustic noise and visual disturbances, while existing multimodal frameworks often rely on computationally intensive 3D convolutions or Transformers, limiting their use on edge devices. To address these limitations, we propose HMMF-Net, a lightweight multimodal architecture that combines early multi-frame visual encoding and multi-axis acoustic modeling through a hierarchical bidirectional messenger cross-modal fusion (BMCF) mechanism. The visual branch captures temporal variations in feeding behavior by stacking temporally distant frames as a multi-channel input to an adapted 2D EfficientNetB0 backbone. The acoustic branch employs adaptive multi-axis residual units (AMARU) to extract temporal, frequency, and local time-frequency representations from log-mel spectrograms. BMCF progressively exchanges information between the two modalities at intermediate representation levels through compact messenger tokens, reducing the computational overhead of dense cross-modal attention. Evaluated on the AV-FFIA dataset using five-fold cross-validation, HMMF-Net achieves 96.77% accuracy and 96.88% F1-score on the held-out test folds, with 3.987M parameters and 1.002 GFLOPs. Compared with the best-performing visual configuration (95.49% accuracy), HMMF-Net reduces the classification error by 28.38%. Deployment on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano using TensorRT with FP32 precision maintains comparable accuracy, with an inference time of 11.54 ms per 2-second sample and a model size of 18.81 MB. These results demonstrate that HMMF-Net combines effective multimodal representation learning with computational efficiency, enabling accurate and practical FFIA on resource-constrained edge platforms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09224
Context is central to human auditory perception, as listeners interpret sounds within their acoustic environment to resolve ambiguity. However, large-scale datasets that jointly capture sound events and acoustic scenes remain limited. We address this by augmenting AudioSet Strong with clip-level scene annotations under two taxonomies for joint sceneevent modeling. A corpus-scale analysis shows that scene identity is better captured by events distinctive to a scene than by those that merely occur frequently. Reweighting event co-occurrences toward scene-specific associations produces representations that better align with human-derived taxonomies, while also exposing scenes where the acoustic and semantic views diverge. This geometric divergence predicts classification errors, while supervised validation confirms that the proposed scene annotations provide meaningful complementary information for developing scalable context-aware machine listening systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09199
Language-guided embodied person tracking requires a mobile agent to identify a target from a referring description and consistently follow the target under egocentric observations. We present DobotTrack, a target-grounded vision-language-action (VLA) framework that integrates auxiliary grounding supervision with efficient temporal modeling. We systematically investigate five auxiliary tasks---person segmentation, bounding-box grounding, visual-spatial classification (VSC), future DINO feature prediction, and future-frame prediction---and adopt complementary mask and bounding-box supervision to enhance target delineation and localization. We introduce Q-identity, a target-conditioned historical visual compression module that leverages target-grounding predictions to selectively preserve identity-discriminative appearance features and spatial cues in compact historical tokens. On EVT-Bench, our 0.8B-parameter model achieves an average success rate of 77.9%, exceeding OmTrackVLA by 16.9 percentage points across the three tasks. We further construct a real-world person-tracking dataset collected using a quadruped robot, comprising 126 episodes and 596,323 mask-annotated frames. The target masks enable automatic derivation of bounding boxes and visual-spatial labels encoding horizontal position and apparent image scale, providing additional grounding supervision without separate manual annotation of these labels. Together, our framework and annotation pipeline support learning target-grounded tracking policies from simulated and real-world data. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09041
A joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) that applies prediction supervision only at masked positions struggles to clearly capture object shapes and boundaries in its latent representations. We further observe that some existing methods improve spatial structure while also retaining rich variations in texture and color. However, preserving more low-level visual information does not necessarily make representations better suited to prediction and action. This raises a key question: how can we strengthen the spatial structure in latent representations that supports prediction and action without over-encoding these details? We introduce LEF-JEPA, which learns spatial structure through target-guided latent recovery and transfers this supervision to the visual encoder through a relative-energy constraint; the energy module is used only during pretraining and adds no inference overhead. To reduce the cost of energy optimization during pretraining, we further construct a conditional Ising Hamiltonian that allows low-energy-state search to be performed by specialized Ising solvers. On physical hardware, we validate the feasibility of achieving lower forward latency with fewer local updates. Under a unified CIFAR-10 pretraining and frozen-encoder evaluation protocol, both realizations outperform V-JEPA2.1 in image classification, foreground segmentation, and visual planning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08989
Generative models of brain MRI are useful to understand brain conditions, and to enrich scarce and imbalanced neuroimaging data. However, training these models requires large, multi-site training sets, which is challenging. Federated learning (FL) allows for training deep learning models without sharing data. We show that training a 3D conditional latent model federatedly (where data is kept private at each site) performs similarly to centralized training (where all the data have been copied to a single site). We evaluate three metrics: conditional fidelity (how well generated MRIs perform in classification), diversity (how the generated images match the real data distribution, using MultiScale-SSIM), and realism (how close generated images are to real images, using Fréchet Inception Distance). Our results show that federated training is a viable route to develop multi-site generative models of brain MRI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08771
In industrial tabular fraud classification, gradient-boosted trees remain state-of-the-art, but even a well-trained model has blind spots, and retraining the deployed model is not always safe. We propose a framework that patches such a model without modifying it: LLMs propose rules anchored on features the model underweights by SHAP, and the resulting noisy pool is screened for empirical support and calibrated into an additive, reversible log-lift overlay that runs at the production cut-off. Single-LLM benefit is high-variance and inverts between datasets, so we pool three diverse backbones by equal-weight logit averaging, trading peak gain for a bounded worst case. On a real-world e-commerce fraud detector trained on selection-biased data, continued training regresses even when carefully tuned, whereas the overlay gains on average +2.26% recall at equal precision ($\Delta$R@P) and +1.60% precision at equal recall ($\Delta$P@R) over production cut-offs spanning 30-57% precision and 23-63% recall. On a public benchmark of seven designed bias-shift variants it raises $\Delta$P@R on every variant and keeps $\Delta$R@P near neutral. Each amendment is a readable predicate naming the fraud pattern it covers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08714
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) enable general-purpose embodied intelligence, but their performance is brittle under distribution shift, where unanticipated failures can damage equipment or endanger people. Deploying VLAs in real-world systems therefore requires a runtime monitor that is timely, calibrated, and informative while being efficient enough to run on the edge. Existing methods fail to fulfill these requirements. We present VLA-Tug, a lightweight probe over the latent layers of a VLA backbone that improves early failure detection and bounds the missed-detection and false-alarm rates, with minimal inference overhead. We show that supervising on the pre-failure segment of a trajectory increases early failure detection at matched false-positive rates by up to 30% over the strongest learned baseline. Under shift to unseen tasks, the bounds on missed-detection and false-alarm rates remain valid in up to 86% of runs, versus at most 21% for baselines. Unlike existing methods, VLA-Tug predicts the failure mode to enable corrective actions, raising top-3 accuracy on unseen tasks by up to 44% over a majority baseline. VLA-Tug enables real-time monitoring where the well-timed and informative probe supports lightweight steering that improves task success. We release a dataset of 3,180 annotated manipulation episodes to support future work on latent failure detection in VLAs at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08425
Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a fundamental NLP task concerned with the identification and categorization of subjective information in text. While lexicon-based methods offer transparency, they often struggle with linguistic phenomena such as negation and intensification. Syntactic parsing has been integrated into SA pipelines to address this, but conventional parsers introduce significant computational overhead. Recent work shows that reformulating dependency parsing as a Sequence Labeling (SEL) task can improve efficiency. We propose and compare two strategies for integrating syntactic knowledge into a neural sentiment analysis model under unified Multi-Task Learning (MTL). The first, Standard-MTL, jointly learns dependency parsing (via sequence labeling) and sentiment polarity classification using a shared encoder with two task-specific heads. The second, Contrastive-MTL, provides implicit syntactic guidance through a contrastive auxiliary objective and a syntax-biased attention pooling mechanism, without requiring explicit label prediction. Both rely on syntactic annotations during training and eliminate need for hand-crafted compositional rules or external parsing at inference. We evaluate eleven datasets spanning seven languages---the MARC corpus (English, Spanish, French, German) and seven datasets from SemEval-2022 Task 10 (English, Spanish, Norwegian, Basque, Catalan)---using four established SEL encodings. With the relative encoding, Contrastive-MTL outperforms a syntax-naive baseline on 10 of 11 datasets and surpasses the external rule-based pipeline (SELSP) that parses at inference on all six datasets where the latter applies, while being 1.5--9$\times$ faster at evaluation. Standard-MTL is more dataset- and encoding-dependent. These results show implicit syntactic supervision during training can match or exceed explicit parsing at inference without computational overhead.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08323
Automatic sleep stage classification from electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a critical task in clinical sleep medicine. While deep learning models have shown promising results in this domain, their performance is fundamentally constrained by the quality of training labels, which human experts manually annotate and that are subject to inter-rater disagreement and systematic labeling errors. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-assisted label-noise filtering pipeline that operates exclusively during training to identify and remove unreliable sleep-stage annotations before retraining the classifier. Specifically, TinySleepNet is first trained on the original dataset to extract per-epoch SoftMax confidence scores, then low-confidence epochs are submitted to LLaMA 3.1 along with their EEG spectral features and surrounding sequence context. The LLM evaluates each epoch against AASM sleep-scoring guidelines and assigns a verdict of RELIABLE or SUSPICIOUS. Suspicious epochs are removed from the training set, and TinySleepNet is retrained on the cleaned data. Evaluated on the Sleep-EDF Expanded dataset using 20-fold cross-validation, our method improves overall accuracy from 81.8% to 84.6% and Macro F1-score from 75.6% to 77.4%, with particularly notable gains in REM detection. Crucially, because the LLM operates only during training, the lightweight TinySleepNet architecture (1.3M parameters) is preserved at inference, making the proposed pipeline suitable for real-time, wearable sleep monitoring applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08311
Medical 3D scans and reports are inherently hierarchical, with diagnostic cues concentrated in specific anatomical regions across multiple levels of organization. Yet, most medical vision-language models ignore this structure and fail to focus on clinically relevant anatomy. We introduce MedHiVE, which combines hierarchical vision-language Soft Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) with contrastive learning to jointly model fine-grained anatomy and global scan context. To our knowledge, MedHiVE is the first framework to route both vision and text tokens through a two-level SMoE hierarchy organized by anatomical scale, coupling this with report-derived anatomy-level contrastive alignment for 3D medical imaging. This replaces the direct region-text alignment of statically pooled features and vision-only hierarchical routing of prior work with dynamic, slot-based cross-modal information flow across anatomical scales. MedHiVE operates via a two-level, learnable token-routing mechanism, where local image and text features are first routed through a local SMoE and then fused by a global SMoE into unified multimodal representations. Contrastive learning aligns both anatomy-level and global vision-language representations in a unified space. Pre-trained on 25,000+ CT scans with anatomical supervision, MedHiVE consistently surpasses 11 state-of-the-art methods across 6 datasets on 3 tasks: segmentation, classification, and detection, demonstrating the importance of hierarchical modeling. The code for MedHiVE is at this http URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08185
Image classification models often encounter objects in diverse and unpredictable contexts at test time, which may differ substantially from those seen during training. This phenomenon, termed context shift, exposes a key fragility in neural networks: when models rely on non-causal contextual cues for prediction, shifts in context can lead to significant performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel training framework to improve the robustness of convolutional neural networks under context shift. Our approach leverages spatial feature attribution to guide models toward making predictions that rely less on contextual regions and more on object-relevant features. As a first step, recognizing a theoretical limitation of existing feature attribution methods we introduce a new variant, ContrastiveCAMs, which produces more faithful attribution maps of model predictions. Building on ContrastiveCAMs, we further propose Context-Regularized Cross-Entropy (CR-CE), a modification of the standard cross-entropy loss that regularizes the model's attention by suppressing the influence of contextual regions, thereby improving robustness to context shift. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on several medium-to-large scale datasets (Waterbirds, Spawrious, ImageNet/ImageNet-BG, Hard-ImageNet), and report consistent improvements in context-shift robustness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08157
Weather fronts are transition regions between air masses with contrasting thermodynamic properties and are associated with mid-latitude precipitation and severe weather. We investigate machine learning (ML) methods for detecting weather fronts and quantify the contribution of reanalysis data to performance. We compare two configurations of the same ML model for pixel-wise frontal classification over the North Atlantic and Europe: (1) using only geostationary infrared satellite observations, and (2) additionally using 28 ERA5 reanalysis fields. The satellite-only model achieves a neighbourhood critical success index at a 150 km tolerance (CSI@150) of $0.402$, which lies within the range of agreement between analyses from different meteorological services. The satellite$+$ERA5 model achieves $0.575$, an improvement of $0.173$. Our analysis shows that low-level winds are the least predictable from the satellite representation ($R^2 = 0.23$, compared with $0.88$ for temperature), while removing winds or moisture causes the largest decreases in detection performance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08148
This paper presents a novel task of describing human facial expressions of a facial image in natural language, which captures the nuances of facial actions and emotional states beyond traditional emotion categories or facial action units (AUs). To achieve the facial expression captioning model, we propose a three-stage training framework that trains a vision-to-language model using synthesized image-text pairs and the BLIP-2 pre-training techniques. To overcome the challenge of missing training image-text pairs for facial expression captioning, we propose a strategy that involves synthesizing and combining captions using GPT-3.5 and existing annotations on either emotion categories or AUs. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating captions that describe details of facial actions and emotions, as well as the inferential relationship between them, even when those emotions are not present in the training data. It is also demonstrated that the vision-to-language task enhances the performance of the intermediate visual features on both AU detection and emotion classification tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08138
Rare genetic disorders are difficult to diagnose due to their diversity and overlapping clinical features. Facial morphology can provide diagnostic clues, yet most diagnostic models offer limited interpretability and are not designed to support broad screening for undiagnosed disease. We present ProtoGestalt, an interpretable prototype-based framework for facial phenotyping, rare-disease screening, and syndrome identification. The method extends prototype learning by constraining learned visual features to select facial regions, allowing predictions to be explained through localized and additive evidence. We assess ProtoGestalt's ability to distinguish syndromic from unaffected faces on multiple control datasets and class prevalence values. We further evaluate it's diagnostic performance on syndromes observed during training. The learned prototype-based representations provide significant separation between syndromic and case-matched control images and retain useful performance as the proportion of controls increases. The framework also demonstrates the ability to differentiate among syndromes. Although reasonably accurate specialized models for facial classification of rare disorders already exist, ProtoGestalt offers an interpretable alternative that links predictions to anatomically meaningful facial regions, potentially supporting clinical decision-making and the discovery of phenotype-gene associations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08125
Graph Attention Networks (GATs) are increasingly used in domains where scientists need to read a model's reasoning, from medicine to materials science, yet the routing they learn remains opaque to most explainers. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) follows the model's computation, but in an attention layer the relevance reaching a node is the sum of two mechanically different quantities: its content relevance through the value path and its routing relevance through the attention path. Existing rules either drop one or add them into a single number. We write a single product rule with free weights on the two factors that recovers current approaches as special cases. The value path measures what content a node supplied against a zero baseline; the attention path measures how the node shaped what was passed relative to its neighborhood, and its sign records whether the node's features moved the gating the way the prediction demanded. On a ground-truth classification task, we show that the same node receives negative, positive and near-zero relevance under three settings of the rule. The separated relevance maps yield a hypothesis about the model: it gains by not reading that node. We give reading rules for both paths and argue that they should be interpreted separately.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08088
Tiny object detection remains challenging because tiny instances occupy only a few pixels, and their fine-grained details are easily lost during feature downsampling. Although the highest-resolution feature preserves rich local details for tiny objects, DETR-like detectors often discard it due to its large computational cost, while directly reintroducing this feature also brings dense background noise. To address this problem, we propose ReDHF, a novel framework that Revives the Discarded High-resolution Feature for tiny object detection. ReDHF has three cooperative components. Cross-Scale Deformable Fusion (CSDF) first constructs a semantically enhanced highest-resolution feature and injects its fine-grained details into the shallow feature under a moderate cost. Ellipse-Guided Shallow Supervision (EGSS) then guides the enhanced feature to learn more reliable classification and localization priors by applying geometry-adaptive auxiliary supervision. Full-Scale Query Interaction (FSQI) further enables decoder queries to access both low-level details and high-level semantic information, allowing them to aggregate richer cues for tiny objects. Extensive experiments show that ReDHF consistently improves multiple baselines across different DETR variants and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the evaluated benchmarks. The best ReDHF variants surpass their baselines by +1.4 AP on AI-TOD-v2, +1.6 AP on VisDrone, and +1.5 AP on SODA-D, with especially notable gains on tiny and small objects.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07994
Benchmarks of class-imbalance strategies for multimodal chest X-ray (CXR) and electronic health record (EHR) prediction are often evaluated on record-level splits of cohorts in which one patient contributes several radiographs. We audit such a benchmark on 29,083 MIMIC-CXR radiographs of 10,479 patients with eight diagnosis targets. First, the record-split benchmark was misleading: a lookup table that copies the label of a development-set radiograph with the same EHR vector nearly matched the best model, and on unseen patients every model fell to the level of predicting every case positive. Second, tracing the labels back to MIMIC-IV explained why: each patient's labels are keyword matches on the diagnosis codes of a single admission, copied, with one EHR vector per patient, to all of the patient's radiographs, so about a third of the radiographs carry labels that differ from the codes of their own admission. Third, under patient-separated evaluation with admission-aligned and rule-refined labels, the initial conclusions do not hold: in the evaluated configurations no imbalance strategy raised the observed mean macro F2 over no augmentation by more than 0.01, tuned tree ensembles showed no consistent advantage over tuned logistic regression, and the released EHR variables stayed at the level of the all-positive baseline, whereas the diagnostic history available at imaging time and image embeddings exceeded it, including, with rule-refined labels, a CheXpert-trained encoder that never saw these radiographs; RAD-DINO had seen 96.6% of them during self-supervised pretraining. Adding either encoder to the diagnostic history gave no statistically significant F2 gain; exploratory AUROC gains were significant with RAD-DINO but not with DenseNet. We provide reusable diagnostics, a leakage-aware protocol and a checklist.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07950
Recent innovations in medical imaging have markedly improved brain tumor identification, surpassing conventional diagnostic approaches that suffer from low resolution, radiation exposure, and limited contrast. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is pivotal in precise and accurate tumor characterization owing to its high-resolution, non-invasive nature. This study investigates the synergy among multiple feature representation schemes such as local Binary Patterns (LBP), Gabor filters, Discrete Wavelet Transform, Fast Fourier Transform, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), and Gray-Level Run Length Matrix alongside five learning algorithms namely: k-nearest Neighbor, Random Forest, Support Vector Classifier (SVC), and probabilistic neural network (PNN), and CNN. Empirical findings indicate that LBP in conjunction with SVC and CNN obtained high specificity and accuracy, rendering it a promising method for MRI-based tumor diagnosis. Further to investigate the contribution of LBP, Statistical analysis chi-square and p-value tests are used to confirm the significant impact of LBP feature space for identification of brain Tumor. In addition, The SHAP analysis was used to identify the most important features in classification. In a small dataset, CNN obtained 97.8% accuracy while SVC yielded 98.06% accuracy. In subsequent analysis, a large benchmark dataset is also utilized to evaluate the performance of learning algorithms in order to investigate the generalization power of the proposed model. CNN achieves the highest accuracy of 98.9%, followed by SVC at 96.7%. These results highlight CNN's effectiveness in automated, high-precision tumor diagnosis. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07843
Semantic accuracy is an important dimension of knowledge graph quality. Graph-based scoring methods exploit relational structure, while textual representations allow classifiers to draw on knowledge encoded by pre-trained language models (PLMs). We present GenVer, a generative verifier that scores triples using both their serialized form and generated natural language representations (NLRs). A triple-text alignment procedure selects training pairs for a sequence-to-sequence generator; a BERT-based classifier then combines features from each triple and its generated NLR. On four FactFB variants, constructed from FB15k using perturbed negative triples, GenVer obtains the highest classification accuracy among the evaluated baselines, ranging from 88.56% to 91.52%. The experiments suggest that generated representations can help triple classification, while the case analysis also exposes semantic drift and high-confidence errors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07780
Classification and feature learning are two closely interrelated fundamental tasks. Feature learning in supervised settings is typically achieved by training classification models, under the common assumption that higher classification accuracy implies better feature quality. In this paper, we first point out that classification accuracy reflects the sample-wise local properties of a model on a dataset, whereas feature learning aims to learn features with good dataset-level global properties, such as intra-class compactness and inter-class separability. From the first principle of feature learning, we redesign the binary cross-entropy (BCE) loss, a counterpart of the cross-entropy (CE) loss used in classification. Then, in normalized feature space, we analyze the minima of the BCE and CE losses and show that both can lead to neural collapse, where sample features from different classes become maximally compact and maximally separated. More importantly, by investigating the convergence behaviors of the two losses as the scale factor $\gamma$ varies in the normalized space, we reveal how classification accuracy and feature quality change differently across spaces of different sizes. Under a fixed training strategy, a very large $\gamma$ achieves perfect classification accuracy but slows convergence toward the ideal feature geometry, whereas a very small $\gamma$ makes classification highly sensitive to small perturbations. A moderate $\gamma$ is therefore necessary for simultaneously achieving reliable classification and well-structured features. Extensive experiments validate these findings and demonstrate that BCE loss exhibits advantages in long-tail and open-set recognitions, as it better aligns with the global requirements of feature learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07741