Encrypted traffic classifiers are routinely reported at 95-99% accuracy. We show that on one of two public corpora, the same model and code score macro-F1 0.992 under the evaluation protocol standard in the literature and 0.567 under a protocol that keeps flows from one packet capture on one side of the split. Nothing changes but the partition (gap 0.426 over eight seeds, p = 0.008 after Holm-Bonferroni correction). The inflation is not a property of random splitting as such. On a month of backbone QUIC traffic, we evaluate five split protocols at eight seeds each: random, temporal and client-disjoint splitting are statistically indistinguishable from session-disjoint, while server-disjoint splitting costs 0.192 macro-F1 (d = 17.0, p = 0.008). Which axis matters depends on how the corpus was collected, in a way invisible from its label space. We give a diagnostic that identifies the right axis before any model is trained: single-identifier probes. A decision tree on the capture identifier alone reaches 0.983 under a random split and exactly 0.000 under session-disjoint splitting. Under this evaluation, a metric-trained flow embedding leads four deep baselines but does not beat gradient-boosted trees on twenty packet sizes. Five of our own pre-registered architectural claims fail: distance-based rejection of unknown applications beats softmax thresholding, but ablating every metric objective makes rejection better, because class separation correlates at r = -0.88 with rejection quality. Few-shot enrollment is flat within a corpus but, across corpora, five labelled flows per class recover 91% of the deficit left by failed zero-shot transfer. All splits, results, code and negative findings are released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06290
Cross-modal remote sensing image retrieval (RS-CMIR) requires representations that are simultaneously modality-invariant and semantically discriminative, despite the profound physical gap between heterogeneous sensors such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and multispectral imagery. Recent JEPA-based Predictive self-supervised approaches such as X-JEPA formulate cross-modal alignment as a deterministic latent forecasting task, implicitly assuming uniform patch predictability and leaving cross-modal distributional alignment unaddressed. We propose CAPE-JEPA, a probabilistic cross-modal Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture with three contributions: (i) a cross-attentional Gaussian predictor outputting per-patch parameters (mu, sigma^2) conditioned on opposite-modality context, trained via negative log-likelihood to model inherent cross-sensor prediction uncertainty; (ii) adversarial distributional regularization combining unimodal isotropic Gaussian regularization with a novel cross-modal adversarial variant that aligns modality distributions via worst-case Epps-Pulley characteristic function tests without explicit sample pairing; and (iii) in-training contrastive learning with attention-pooled heads for scene-level discriminative grounding. Evaluated on BigEarthNet-14K (BEN-14K) and fMoW across SAR, multispectral, and RGB modalities, CAPE-JEPA surpasses X-JEPA by up to 13.74 points on BEN-14K and 15.59 points on fMoW, outperforming all baselines including SkySense and CROMA across both unimodal and cross-modal directions while using fewer parameters (407.30M vs. 432.72M).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06247
Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve a target image given a reference image and a modification text. Although recent approaches leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress, we argue that the MLLM's compositional understanding remains underutilized. This stems from directly mapping composed queries into a retrieval embedding via contrastive supervision alone, without explicitly resolving the intended visual modifications. In this work, we introduce Factorized MLLM Embeddings (FactEmbed), which decouples compositional query comprehension from building discriminative embeddings. Rather than directly projecting the composed query into a single embedding without internal reasoning, FactEmbed employs a set of factorized latents that simulate the intended visual modifications via an intermediate target imagination objective. This process encourages the latents to ground into target semantics before forming discriminative representations for retrieval. Subsequently, to propagate these factorized representations throughout the model for retrieval, we optimize a factor-level contrastive loss while distilling the decomposed representations into a deeper attention layer of the MLLM. Finally, for efficient inference, we retain the [EOS] token to establish a global-level embedding on top of these factorized latents, while we exploit the mean-pooled factorized latents to rerank a short candidate list at negligible cost, as both are produced by the same forward pass. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that FactEmbed outperforms prior works across CIR benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05193
Current speech deepfake detectors treat each utterance as a flat sequence of frames, limiting their ability to capture long-range spectral inconsistencies that span non-adjacent regions of an audio signal. We propose \textbf{GraphSeal}, which constructs a temporal-spectral graph over short speech segments and propagates artifact cues through graph attention layers before a global readout produces the bonafide-vs-spoof decision. Each node in the graph corresponds to a fixed-length segment; edges encode temporal adjacency and spectral similarity, letting the network attend to distant frames that share suspicious spectral patterns. A multi-head graph attention mechanism weights neighboring nodes according to both learned features and edge attributes, and a hierarchical readout aggregates node representations into a single utterance-level embedding for binary classification. GraphSeal is front-end agnostic: it operates on top of any self-supervised or handcrafted feature extractor. On ASVspoof 2019~LA, ASVspoof 2021~LA, ASVspoof~5, and the In-the-Wild dataset, GraphSeal achieves equal error rates of 0.52\%, 2.41\%, 8.17\%, and 5.24\%, respectively, matching or outperforming prior methods that rely on fixed-topology graph networks or purely sequential architectures.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06171
Video-LLMs are typically trained on paired video-text data for temporal tasks, yet collecting precise temporal annotations and training on large-scale video datasets are both costly. We investigate whether a text-only LLM, with no vision-language pretraining, can be trained on textual video descriptions alone to perform temporal grounding and receive video only at inference time. This setting removes paired video data from training altogether and is a step toward training multimodal models without paired annotations. We generate a 134K-example corpus of textual sequences with up to 100 time steps, adapt Qwen3-8B with LoRA on CLIP or LLM2CLIP text embeddings, and evaluate on Charades-STA and QV-Highlights without training on videos from either benchmark. LLM2CLIP, whose text encoder supports longer inputs, represents detailed descriptions better than CLIP (61.54 versus 53.86 mtIoU on Temporal-TextVid) and transfers them better to video. Still, replacing text with frame embeddings at inference yields only 4.99 mtIoU on Charades-STA and 11.12 on QV-Highlights, revealing a large modality gap. To bridge it, we propose Nearest Entity Replacement (NER), a training-free mapping that represents each video frame by the normalized mean of its nearest text-entity embeddings, so that the model receives the kind of input it was trained on. NER reaches 14.45 mtIoU on Charades-STA and 20.72 on QV-Highlights, outperforming the strongest of four families of modality-gap baselines by 5.00 and 1.71 points. NER thus enables partial transfer from text to video, while more reliable grounding will likely require encoders with better-aligned text and visual representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06149
High-fidelity 3D geometry generation requires maintaining global structural coherence alongside fine-grained surface details. While recent coarse-to-fine frameworks leverage Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) to condition local queries, we reveal a critical training-inference resolution discrepancy: coordinate guidance and geometric supervision are aligned during training, whereas inference decodes high-resolution geometry from coarse spatial coordinates. This mismatch introduces a severe distribution shift that degrades fine details. To overcome this, we propose Resolution-Decoupled Training (RDT), which anchors RoPE guidance at 512 resolution while supervising geometry at 1536, enabling robust detail extrapolation. Additionally, to eliminate high-resolution data bottlenecks, we present Dual3D-300K, a large-scale paired dataset comprising 300K watertight 3D point clouds explicitly aligned across 512 and 1536 resolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RDT substantially improves sharp geometric regions, while Dual3D-300K offers a scalable benchmark for high-resolution 3D generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06141
Projector-based augmented reality enables natural interaction between users and devices by overlaying digital information onto the physical world through projected imagery. A key technical requirement of such systems is accurate positional alignment between the projector and the devices. Pixel-level Visible Light Communication (PVLC) achieves this alignment without external sensing infrastructure by embedding invisible spatial codes into each projected pixel through high-speed brightness modulation that preserves image quality. However, the information that PVLC transmits is inherently planar. PVLC has therefore been limited to devices moving on a flat surface and cannot estimate the 3D pose of devices in three-dimensional space, such as aerial robots. To extend PVLC-based pose estimation to three dimensions, we formulate it as a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem. The 2D pixel positions that four coplanar photosensors on the device receive via PVLC serve as the image points, and their known 3D layout provides the object points. Experiments show that the proposed system estimates 3D pose with a latency of approximately 8~ms and a 3D position RMSE of 19.2~mm after Kalman filtering. These results confirm the first realization of real-time 3D pose estimation coordinated with high-quality projected image content without external sensing infrastructure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06121
Long video understanding requires VideoLLMs to answer queries about videos spanning tens of minutes to hours, but such long videos produce far more visual tokens than current VideoLLMs can process. To address this issue, keyframe selectors are proposed to select the most query-relevant frames by computing the similarity between frame and query embeddings. Existing selectors either encode frames independently without temporal context or process chunks in isolation with ranking objectives that are difficult to optimize. To alleviate those limitations, we propose FrameScout with two core designs: (i) a streaming selector architecture that leverages a sliding-window KV cache and successor aggregation to produce temporally-contextualized frame embeddings; (ii) a frame-query contrastive objective that aligns frame and query embeddings in a shared space, directly training the selector to distinguish relevant frames from irrelevant ones. Extensive experiments on three long-video benchmarks and six base VideoLLMs demonstrate that FrameScout consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23975
Pretrained vision models provide strong general-purpose representations, but in Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL), where the input distribution changes sequentially, adapting to new domains often degrades performance on previously learned ones. We observe that forgetting is not uniform across domains and classes and is not explained by training order alone. This motivates us to track each past domain-class concept individually. We use representation drift, defined as the deviation of a past concept's current representation from a fixed anchor, as a measurable surrogate for forgetting risk. The measured drift then serves two complementary roles. A consolidation loss assigns stronger preservation to high-drift pairs, while prototype construction down-weights highly drifted domains to reduce their influence on the class reference. Preservation is thus allocated by measured drift rather than assumed importance. To obtain this signal during training without storing past raw data, we repurpose a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). For each domain-class pair, we store only a compact context summary in the backbone feature space and rerun it through the learned context-to-target relation to measure its drift from the fixed anchor. Across DomainNet, Office-Home, CORe50, and CDDB-Hard, our method sustains a strong accuracy-forgetting balance on every benchmark, using substantially less training memory than accuracy-competitive methods and the smallest storage among compared methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06093
Text-to-SVG systems are commonly evaluated by applying raster-image metrics to rasterised outputs, yet whether these scores capture fine-grained prompt faithfulness remains unclear. We introduce SVGFaith, a two-layer meta-evaluation framework in which the more faithful candidate of each pair is determined by construction or by human judgment. SVGFaith-Diagnostic contains 1,842 controlled contrastive pairs across eight capability axes, split evenly between two directions: two renderings compared against one prompt, and two descriptions compared against one rendering. SVGFaith-Arena contains 1,327 human-annotated comparisons of real generator outputs. On SVGFaith-Diagnostic, CLIP and three other image--text embedding metrics reach at least 0.789 pairwise accuracy on object identity but at most 0.672 on spatial relations and attribute binding, where chance is 0.5. We further introduce SVGFaith-Score, an interpretable pointwise metric. A domain-tuned decomposer turns each prompt into a dependency graph of atomic visual requirements, a visual question answering model scores whether each requirement is satisfied, and a requirement's score is discounted when its prerequisites score low. In addition to the overall score, the per-requirement scores show which requirements are judged unsatisfied and which inherit discounts from their prerequisites. SVGFaith-Score significantly outperforms all nine baselines, including a Qwen3.5-122B-A10B judge, on Arena and in both Diagnostic directions. Code and data: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06048
High-content multi-channel imaging, from Cell Painting assays to remote sensing, is central to modern scientific pipelines. Because these channels are highly heterogeneous and experimental configurations frequently evolve, a practical vision backbone must be fundamentally channel-agnostic. Current channel-adaptive vision transformers rely on global self-attention with learnable channel embeddings, which can be computed only for previously known channels. Attempts to overcome this limitation of new channels either discard the embeddings, losing channel identity, or process each channel independently, thereby eliminating critical cross-channel interactions. To address this, we introduce ChanSFormer, an efficient Vision Transformer that replaces rigid embeddings with disentangled spatial-channel attention and individual channel CLS tokens. This architecture natively preserves both distinct channel identities and cross-channel information flow. Furthermore, the individual channel class token design unlocks more informative feature representations for self-supervised learning and enables representation-based channel sampling while remaining channel-agnostic. We evaluate ChanSFormer on two biology multi-channel datasets, CHAMMI, JUMP-CP and a satellite dataset, So2Sat. Experimental results show that ChanSFormer outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 3.93%-4.27% on JUMP-CP in classification accuracy. It also demonstrates exceptional cross-dataset transferability under a self-supervised setting, outperforming previous methods by up to 2.72% in accuracy in the same classification tasks. Furthermore, the disentangled attention reduces the quadratic complexity of channel-by-spatial sequence length of the global attention baseline, thus improving throughput by 55%-313%. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06015
Channel sounding in Wi-Fi multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems must balance channel state information (CSI) accuracy against CSI acquisition overhead. Device mobility causes channel aging, while autoregressive CSI prediction introduces errors that accumulate over sounding intervals. However, standardized statistical channel models cannot fully capture the environment-specific channel dynamics encountered in physical artificial intelligence (AI) applications, motivating the use of Sionna-based ray tracing to evaluate CSI prediction under device mobility and evolving propagation geometry. This paper develops a dynamic sounding framework that integrates autoregressive CSI prediction with signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR)-constrained interval selection. A Transformer with rotary position embedding that converts device positions into CSI sequences predicts CSI across multiple subcarriers for beamforming updates between sounding exchanges. We formulate sounding-interval selection as a predicted average-throughput maximization problem under per-stream SINR lower-bound constraints, including CSI acquisition and processing overhead. A prediction-error perturbation analysis provides the SINR bounds, and cumulative-sum enumeration globally solves the finite single-variable problem. Actual SINR feasibility holds whenever the prediction errors satisfy the bounds. Ray-tracing experiments assess channel prediction, trajectory transfer, and autoregressive prediction errors. In single-STA Wi-Fi 7 link-level simulations, predicted-CSI beamforming improves mean goodput by 67.3%, 112.7%, and 119.1% over stale CSI for linear, circular, and cosine trajectories, respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05970
Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) support planning by comparing predicted latent states with an encoded goal. For this comparison to guide temporal progress, states closer in time to the goal should receive lower costs. However, training representations for prediction and distribution regularization does not directly enforce this ordering. We examine this mismatch in flat LeWorldModel (LeWM) by analyzing how its Euclidean goal cost changes with temporal separation. Our analysis identifies conditions under which states at different long offsets receive similar average costs, weakening their temporal distinction. To learn the missing ordering explicitly, we introduce Time-to-Goal (T2G), a lightweight metric trained on latent triples from offline trajectories. A margin ranking loss encourages smaller distances for temporally nearer states, requiring no rewards or policy labels. The learned metric then replaces the Euclidean planning cost while the JEPA encoder and predictor remain frozen. Diagnostics on AntMaze and FourRoom show that T2G preserves stronger temporal contrast and improves near--far ranking at long offsets. Across four navigation and manipulation benchmarks, T2G improves the average planning success rate from 32.7\% (flat LeWM) to 63.0\% and approaches or even surpasses the performance of the hierarchical H-JEPA baselines. These results show that learning temporal ordering for the goal cost can substantially improve latent planning even with a flat world model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05847
The quadratic attention cost of Vision Transformers (ViTs) forces a trade-off between spatial resolution and rollout horizon, particularly for fine-scale PDEs where shocks, reaction fronts, and material interfaces occupy small, evolving regions of the domain. Conventional neural surrogates also lack mechanisms to adapt resolution dynamically. We propose WAMRViT, a ViT that tokenizes inputs as balanced quadtrees using a wavelet-inspired refinement criterion, jointly encodes position and refinement level with 3D rotary positional embeddings, and regrids in cell space during inference for stable long-horizon rollouts. A multi-scale variant retains each leaf at its native source resolution and lets the model learn across resolution levels. Unlike fixed-budget adaptive-tokenization methods, WAMRViT imposes no predetermined token count and supports fully adaptive topology throughout autoregressive rollout. To our knowledge, it is the first machine-learning surrogate to natively tokenize multi-level Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data. On uniform-grid benchmarks, uniform-patch WAMRViT improves finest-level region-of-interest VRMSE over a finest-patch uniform ViT while using substantially fewer tokens. The multi-scale variant achieves the lowest first-step full-field RMSE and VRMSE on both benchmarks and improves rollout-averaged full-field and refined-region accuracy at long horizons. With parallelized regridding, its end-to-end rollout cost lies between finest-patch and approximately token-matched coarser-patch ViTs. On a complex AMR combustion problem whose finest features cannot be represented natively by the evaluated uniform-grid baselines, WAMRViT operates on adaptive cells built from the simulator hierarchy and substantially reduces finest-level error at matched transformer capacity. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.04044
How much phonological knowledge do language models (LMs) possess about Chinese characters, and how is this knowledge represented and used? We introduce PinyinBench, a controlled benchmark covering homophones, phonological features (initials, finals, and tones), and polyphonic characters. We investigate 17 text-only and multimodal LMs through three complementary approaches: behavioral evaluation, layer-wise probing, and activation steering. Behaviorally, models demonstrate substantial knowledge of initials and finals, with a frontier model (DS-v4-flash) scoring 90%+ in homophone judgment, when two characters share no phonological features. However, its accuracy drops sharply to 72% when two characters differ only in lexical tone. Probing reveals that tone is highly decodable from embeddings and improves modestly across layers, whereas segmental information starts less decodable and improves substantially with depth. Activation steering shows that segmental representations can systematically influence generation, while tone exhibits much weaker effects. Furthermore, audio-bearing training improves phonological decodability, including tone, without corresponding improvements in steering effectiveness. Together, these findings reveal distinct representational and functional profiles for segmental and tonal information, with tonal information much harder to access and manipulate, demonstrating the necessity for combined evaluation, probing, and causal intervention for understanding linguistic knowledge in LMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05803
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external memory stores to retain information across conversations, typically via dense vector embeddings searched with approximate nearest-neighbor methods. The fruit fly's olfactory circuit computes a locality-sensitive hash of sensory input using a strikingly different mechanism - sparse random projection followed by winner-take-all competition - and prior work (Dasgupta et al., 2017) showed this scheme, dubbed FlyHash, preserves neighbor structure better per bit than conventional random-hyperplane hashing (SimHash) on several benchmarks. We apply FlyHash, to our knowledge for the first time, to LLM agent memory retrieval, and ask three questions a practitioner actually needs answered: does the quality advantage hold under a correctly matched-bit protocol (it does, robustly, across 10 seeds and four datasets spanning two modalities, with one specific, previously undocumented comparison pitfall identified and corrected along the way); does that advantage translate into real memory and latency savings, including against the dense-vector indexing (HNSW) practitioners default to today (no: at equal bits FlyHash's codes are larger and slower to compare than SimHash's, and HNSW dominates both hash methods at ordinary scale; a sparse-set comparison we introduce recovers most but not all of a naive latency gap, leaving hashing's practical case narrower and more specific than the quality result alone implies); and does the advantage survive genuine, non-circular agent-memory relevance labels rather than the nearest-neighbor-by-embedding proxy this literature otherwise relies on (it does). We report all three answers precisely, including the two that narrow rather than flatter the headline result, and release our implementation, a working agent-memory demo, and a full account of the methodological pitfalls we found and corrected.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05791
This study investigates the authorship impersonation capacity of six widely used large language models (LLMs): Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Opus, GPT 5.2, GPT 5.2 Pro, DeepSeek 3.2, and Grok 4.1 Fast. The evaluation was conducted using short product review texts selected to ensure high within author consistency in individual writing style. Two types of in context prompt were designed: a simple prompt with minimal instruction and a complex prompt incorporating explicit stylometric guidance for mimicry. Authorship mimicry was evaluated using a cosine distance based distance to training metric, supplemented by visual analyses of embedding distributions. The results indicate that authorship impersonation remained challenging for most LLMs, with Gemini 3 Pro showing the strongest apparent mimicry performance. However, subsequent overlap analysis revealed that Gemini 3 Pro extensively copied and reused sentences and phrases from the training texts, at levels far exceeding those observed among human authors. Follow up factor analyses showed that training set consistency was the most robust predictor of mimicry success across models, whereas author distinctiveness did not generalise as a reliable predictor. Global embedding visualisations further revealed a consistent macro level pattern: for most models, generated texts occupied regions of the embedding space that were largely separated from the corresponding human training clusters. This indicates limited convergence towards target author style and suggests the presence of model specific lexical and phraseological preferences. The findings highlight the importance of distinguishing genuine stylistic imitation from direct textual reuse and have implications for the forensic analysis of textual evidence involving potential LLM enabled impersonation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05771
Time series forecasting is a critical task across domains such as energy, finance, and meteorology, where accurate predictions enable informed decision-making. While transformer-based and large-parameter models have recently achieved state-of-the-art results, their complexity can lead to overfitting and unstable forecasts, especially when older data points become less relevant. In this paper, we propose a lightweight multi-view approach to short-term load forecasting that leverages single-value embeddings and a scaled time-range input to capture temporally relevant features efficiently. We introduce an embedding dropout mechanism to prevent over-reliance on specific features and enhance interpretability. Our method achieves competitive performance with significantly fewer parameters, demonstrating robustness across multiple datasets, including scenarios with noisy or sparse data, and provides insights into the contributions of individual features to the forecast.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09220
Owing to the prohibitive cost of manual annotation for enormous medical images, self-supervised learning (SSL) has gained substantial attention and shown promise in various medical imaging tasks. Among SSL approaches, contrastive learning has emerged as a prominent one, encouraging models to encode semantic information that remains invariant between different augmented views. However, this invariance can be spurious for medical images, as subtle but critical medical features can be suppressed during augmentations. In this paper, we mitigate this issue by encoding the learned feature embeddings as probability distributions rather than fixed vectors, thus capturing a richer and more nuanced spectrum of information. Furthermore, we propose a unified probabilistic framework that seamlessly integrates multiple SSL approaches. Our method achieves superior performance over the state-of-the-art SSL methods on various downstream tasks across multiple datasets, including medical image segmentation and classification. We further validate the method through additional analyses of robustness to stronger augmentations, label efficiency under limited fine-tuning labels, and computational trade-offs. The code is released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05734
Dimension reduction rests on a claim: t-SNE and UMAP preserve local structure, PCA global structure. Our DLP curve is the share of each point's k nearest neighbors a map keeps. Corrected for chance, it gives L at k=10 and G over 30 to 50% of the data, local and global fidelity. At the midpoint the curve is provably a rank correlation of distances. The LG reversal test decides, with a stated error rate, which of two maps is local and which global. On twelve datasets of up to 1.38 million points, G agrees with established global scores at 0.84 and 0.93, and the area under R_NX at 0.22 and 0.30. The entity fidelity E, read at each point's entity size, predicts which entities a map loses beyond L and G where entity sizes differ. In an agent memory of one million passages, t-SNE and PCA cross at 150,000 passages (p=2.6e-5).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00290