Enhancement
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Two Communities, One Problem: Branch-and-Bound vs. A* for Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling
2026-11-10 18:03:17Izack Cohen, Dominik Kress, Lara Nehrke, Erwin Pesch, Shimrit ShternAbstract
Branch-and-Bound (B&B) and $A^*$ are popular exact search methods originating from Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence, respectively. Although the two methods share fundamental search principles, their different ways of exploring the search space can lead to substantially different computational performance. We investigate these differences using the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as an exemplary problem setting. We first establish the relationships between mixed-integer linear programming, state-action, and timed Petri-net representations. Since B&B and $A^*$ admit numerous algorithmic enhancements, we focus on relatively basic implementations. This allows us to examine the fundamental differences between the methods rather than compare the performance of state-of-the-art solvers. By using the same lower bound and best-first node selection, we isolate the effects of the search mechanisms, particularly the identification of equivalent states reached through different scheduling decision sequences. Experiments on 480 benchmark RCPSP instances show that graph-based $A^*$ substantially outperforms the B&B variants considered. With additional pruning rules, $A^*$ proves optimality for all 480 instances, compared with 445 for best-first B&B under the same time and memory limits. Depth-first B&B uses less memory and can find feasible solutions even when the search does not finish within the time limit. Stronger linear programming relaxations reduce the search space but introduce considerable computational overhead. Our findings highlight the importance of duplicate-state detection and clarify the computational trade-offs between the search approaches. These insights can help researchers select an appropriate method and identify opportunities to incorporate effective mechanisms from one approach into the other.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14426
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CAppleNet: A Coordinate Attention-Based YOLO11 for Real-Time Apple Stem Cavity and Calyx Detection
2026-11-10 11:08:44Alican G\"une\c{s}, Robert Selim Hill, G\"okhan Hasano\u{g}lu, Murat KurtAbstract
Automated fruit grading, sorting, and orientation systems require real-time, accurate detection of fruit-level morphological landmarks rather than the fruit boundary alone. This paper presents a custom, fully self-collected and self-annotated dataset of 1506 apple images (1054 training, 301 validation, 151 test) captured under controlled, fixed-camera conditions and annotated for three target classes: fruit body, stem cavity, and calyx. A YOLO11s detector trained with default hyperparameters is adopted as the baseline, and a systematic, one-factor-at-a-time ablation study is conducted across input resolution, data augmentation policy, optimizer configuration, and lightweight architectural enhancement to identify the factors that most improve detection of these fine-grained landmarks under high inter-cultivar color and texture variability. Neither increased input resolution, nor any of six tested augmentation variants, nor manual optimizer tuning improved on the untuned baseline (F1 = 0.9047); only a same-slot architectural substitution of the backbone's C2PSA block with Coordinate Attention (CA) matched the baseline's overall F1 (0.9038) while reducing parameter count by 10.2% and achieving the study's best mAP@0.5 (0.935) and best stem-cavity F1 (0.8217). A confidence-threshold sweep identified 0.15 as the deployment operating point for this model, and a confirmatory experiment combining the CA-swap architecture with the best-performing augmentation variant showed the two effects do not combine additively, reversing the architectural gain rather than compounding it. The resulting design recommendations --- the CA-swap architecture alone, at a 0.15 confidence threshold --- target real-time apple landmark detection for orientation-aware industrial sorting and alignment systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13920
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Adapting a Vision Foundation Model for Fracture Characterization in Acoustic Image Logs
2026-11-10 11:04:27Guangyu Wang, Xiaodong Ma, Xinming WuAbstract
Natural fractures (NFs) and drilling-induced tensile fractures (DITFs) in acoustic image logs provide insights into rock mass structure and in situ stress, but manual characterization is time-consuming. Deep learning can automate this task, although expert-labeled data are scarce. We investigate whether adapting a pretrained vision foundation model (VFM) outperforms task-specific models trained from scratch with limited annotations. Using 80 annotated acoustic image samples, we fine-tuned DINOv3, pretrained on satellite imagery, and evaluated it on four boreholes excluded from fine-tuning. The adapted model estimated NF and DITF parameters comparably to human interpretation. Relative to U-Net, YOLOv8, and Swin Transformer models trained from scratch, it yielded fewer false positives and negatives and more accurate fracture counts and orientations. However, its performance advantage generally narrowed as training sample size decreased. We also assessed decoder architecture, fine-tuning strategy, and image enhancement. A progressive upsampling decoder with full fine-tuning performed best among the DINOv3 configurations tested, while fracture-focused image enhancement did not consistently improve accuracy. These results demonstrate the potential of VFM adaptation for fracture characterization in acoustic image logs with limited labeled data and suggest a transferable workflow for other annotation-scarce geoscientific imaging tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13911
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Image Quality and the Reliability of Fabric-Density Measurement: Counting Threads from Smartphone Photos Through a Pick Glass
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Thread density, the threads per inch along and across a woven fabric, is a basic specification that buyers check whenever fabric is sold. Without laboratory instruments, inspectors count it slowly, by eye, through a pick glass, a folding 10$\times$ magnifier with a one-inch window. A smartphone photo through that glass could make the check faster and leave a record. We judge such a photo by what it is used for, as in task-based image quality: it is good if the thread count from it is within $\pm$5% of the true count, a common tolerance in fabric specifications. We introduce PickGlass-TPI: 76 factory scenes of 44 fabric patches, each counted in an open annotation tool by a textile-trained annotator, whose counts are the reference. On it we benchmark frontier and open vision-language models, CNNs, counting specialists and a training-free spectral counter (PG-Lattice). No method agrees with the reference within the tolerance. The best methods are off by about a quarter: a small open model that we tuned only on synthetic images (Molmo2-4B, 25%) is level with the best frontier model, GPT-6.1-sol (27% when asked directly, 25% given four magnified close-ups of the window). Both err less than a non-expert annotator (37%), but only the tuned model also beats, on both error measures, a baseline that guesses each scene's density as the average of the others. PG-Lattice most often repeats its count within 5% across two photos of the same patch, but its misses, like GPT-6.1-sol's errors, are often a factor of two. Even the reference repeats a count across such re-shoots only to a median 9%, so one photo cannot yet be shown to meet $\pm$5%; the image quality that matters is reliability across re-shoots. Generic no-reference quality scores chosen before labeling do not rank PG-Lattice's error, and generative enhancement raises perceptual scores but does not reliably improve the count.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13200
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GTCRN-SS: Lightweight Causal Speech Separation with Residual Allocation and Reconstruction Refinement
2026-11-06 11:57:10Shao-Chun Hu, Zi-Xiang Lin, Hsin-Min Wang, Jeih-Weih Hung, Hung-Shin LeeAbstract
Low-complexity causal speech separation must preserve speaker information and allocate residual mixture energy without relying on future feature frames. We present GTCRN-SS, a two-stage time-frequency separator that adapts the compact GTCRN enhancement backbone to fixed-output speech separation. The model combines internal residual allocation, reconstruction-conditioned refinement, and frame-aligned recurrent-state transfer. Its complex-mask estimator assigns non-target content to an unreturned residual branch, while the complementary speech estimate conditions a second stage whose final masks remain anchored to the original mixture. A lightweight low-rank adapter transfers causal recurrent evidence between recursive executions without adding another recurrent memory network. The neural graph excludes future feature frames and incurs only the fixed analysis look-ahead of the centered short-time Fourier transform. On noisy Libri2Mix, GTCRN-SS achieves 10.1 dB SDRi and 9.5 dB SI-SNRi with fewer than one million parameters and a low computational footprint. Independently trained ablations confirm the benefits of recurrent-state transfer and reconstruction conditioning, and corpus-level diagnostics show that the internal branch primarily captures residual rather than target-speech content. These results establish GTCRN-SS as an effective quality-efficiency operating point for causal monaural speech separation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09358
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Bootstrap Your Own AV-Proxies: Adaptive Contrastive and Prototype Learning for Audio-Visual Segmentation
2026-11-06 09:14:18Junbo Zhang, Hang Su, Zhaofan Li, Hang Dong, Chao SunAbstract
Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to accurately segment sounding objects in video frames by leveraging audio-visual correspondence cues. However, it remains challenging due to the intrinsic semantic incompleteness within a single modality and the semantic gap between audio and visual representations. Traditional feature-fusion decoding approaches struggle to suppress fusion noise effectively, while recent methods that incorporate data-dependent priors often increase the complexity of modeling audio-visual correlations, leading to poor cross-domain generalization. To address these issues, we propose a novel adaptive contrastive and prototype learning framework, BYOAVP, for AVS. Specifically, we design a Self-Supervised Audio Enhancement (SSAE) module that introduces contrastive learning to adaptively align audio representations with gradient-blocked visual embeddings, thus narrowing the semantic gap between modalities. Furthermore, a Dynamic Prototype Constraint (DPC) module is developed to refine pixel-wise category perception via momentum-based prototype updating, while enhancing localization of sounding regions through cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance across two AVS benchmarks and six sub-tasks, exhibiting strong robustness and generalization ability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09191
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Adaptive Low-Light Enhancement for Road Anomaly Detection: A Multi-Architecture Benchmark and Edge Deployment Study
2026-11-05 18:06:59Obed Honour Eje, Oluwatosin Kolade, Glory Bagai, Taliha Abiodun FolorunsoAbstract
Road anomaly detection systems on autonomous vehicles must function reliably under degraded visual conditions including darkness, rain, and Harmattan dust haze. This paper benchmarks four object detection architectures, YOLOv8n, YOLOv12n, RT-DETR, and Faster R-CNN, under physically grounded lighting and weather degradation, and shows that uniform application of the SCI low-light enhancement network is actively harmful at dusk-level lighting (-16.1% to -30.7% mAP@50). We propose a lightweight, training-free luminance-adaptive router that selects between no enhancement, moderate SCI, and denoising plus strong SCI based on per-frame Rec. 601 luminance, recovering most of the dusk penalty while preserving low-light gains, and we validate the full pipeline on NVIDIA Jetson Nano edge hardware.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08393
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CMDiff: Left Atrial Scar Segmentation from 3D LGE MRI Using Conditional Mask Diffusion Model: A Feasibility Study
2026-11-05 10:53:13Jing Zhang, Bastien Bergere, Jonas Leite, Emilie Bollache, Mika\"el Laredo, Alban Redheuil, Nadjia KachenouraAbstract
Late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) cardiac MRI enables non-invasive assessment of left atrial (LA) scar, an imaging marker associated with atrial fibrillation ablation outcome. However, automatic scar segmentation is hindered by low contrast, the thin atrial wall, scarce labels, and extreme class imbalance. Conditional diffusion offers iterative mask generation, but its suitability for sparse 3D LA scar segmentation remains unclear. To address this gap, we propose Conditional Mask Diffusion (CMDiff), which predicts clean masks using a dynamic-encoder-conditioned 3D sinusoidal UNet. We compared CMDiff with a deterministic baseline on identical cases in five-fold cross-validation of 60 scar-labelled public LASCARQS subjects, with 48 training and 12 held-out cases per fold. CMDiff achieved a scar DSC of 0.47 $\pm$ 0.08, HD95 of 12.89 $\pm$ 6.39 mm, and ASD of 1.91 $\pm$ 0.96 mm, compared with deterministic baseline values of 0.51 $\pm$ 0.08, 10.86 $\pm$ 5.39 mm, and 1.58 $\pm$ 1.03 mm, respectively. Under the same implementation, clean-mask prediction performed substantially better than the noise-prediction configuration evaluated in this study. Thus, CMDiff was technically feasible but did not improve segmentation performance: DSC was lower, and both HD95 and ASD were higher. Direct mask diffusion therefore provides an analytical alternative, but not a competitive performance advance for this task. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07814
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Generator-Aligned Reward Modeling with Target-Aware Bounded Optimization for Visual Generation
2026-11-05 08:34:25Ziqiao Weng, Yuanzhi Liang, Haibing Huang, Weidong Cai, Xuelong LiAbstract
Post-training aims to enhance desired attributes in visual generative models while preserving their general generation capabilities. Reward-guided post-training faces two challenges: real training data may mismatch the generator's output distribution, and attribute supervision may be confounded by unrelated content. Unbounded reward maximization can also cause overoptimization and degrade generation quality. We propose a framework combining Generator-Aligned Reward Modeling (GARM) and Target-Aware Bounded Optimization (TABO). GARM mitigates distribution mismatch through generator-support matching and reduces content confounding using content-matched real contrasts, yielding generator-relevant, attribute-focused reward supervision. TABO maps the learned reward to a smooth, upper-bounded function calibrated from real target-positive examples. This transformation is independent of the optimization algorithm and supports both direct reward-gradient and policy-based optimization. We further introduce Target-Aware GRPO (TA-GRPO), an adaptation of Flow-GRPO that combines fixed stage-wise advantage scaling, a generator-to-target curriculum, and timestep-balanced credit assignment for flow-based video optimization. Experiments show that GARM improves target-attribute expression while maintaining competitive generation quality. TABO better balances attribute enhancement and visual quality than unconstrained reward maximization, while TA-GRPO improves target enhancement over vanilla Flow-GRPO and reduces unintended attribute leakage on neutral prompts. These results highlight the importance of generator-aligned reward supervision and controlled, data-calibrated optimization for targeted visual generation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07648
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Design of a Speech Enhancement-Based Deep Semantic Autoencoder for Wireless Communications
2026-11-05 02:56:11Xiaoling Han, Bin Lin, Nan Wu, Tony Q. S. QuekAbstract
Speech communication plays a crucial role in the Internet of Things and autonomous networks. However, traditional communication systems suffer from insufficient semantic extraction and limited noise suppression capability. To address these issues, we propose a Speech enhancement-based Deep Semantic Autoencoder (S-DSA) communication system for wireless communications. It consists of a dual-branch semantic encoder, a channel encoder, a channel decoder, and two semantic decoders, enabling joint source-channel coding for robust transmission. A key novelty lies in an adaptive semantic noise decoupling mechanism that disentangles target speech semantics from noise representations through an interaction module, thus maintaining semantic consistency under low SNR conditions. Furthermore, a joint training strategy optimizes speech reconstruction and noise estimation, while a lightweight testing strategy reduces complexity by disabling the noise-decoding path. The proposed S-DSA enables more effective separation between speech and noise, and yields higher robustness as well as better reconstruction quality. These findings highlight the potential of the proposed S-DSA as a practical solution for next-generation intelligent wireless communications.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07361
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CRESiST: Self-Enhancing Explorative Policy Learning for Simultaneous Speech Translation
2026-11-04 13:32:57Chenyang Le, Pei Zhang, Yuxiang Chen, Bing Han, Derek F. Wong, Baosong Yang, Yanmin QianAbstract
Simultaneous Speech Translation (SimulST) requires balancing translation quality and latency. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in offline translation, current LLM-based SimulST systems predominantly rely on prefix-incremental generation. This paradigm suffers from redundant Key-Value cache recomputation and necessitates external Voice Activity Detection to process unbounded streams. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose an end-to-end interleaved read-write framework built upon an omni-modal LLM. By interleaving speech chunks and text tokens, our architecture achieves full KV cache reuse, natively supporting segmentation-free, infinite-length inference. Furthermore, to learn optimal streaming policies without rigid offline alignments, we introduce a novel Actor-Critic self-enhancement pipeline. An RNN-T Actor dynamically samples read-write trajectories, while an LLM-based Critic evaluates these paths via intrinsic semantic and latency rewards, distilling the optimal policy back to the Actor. Extensive experiments on sentence-level (FLEURS, CoVoST2) and document-level (MuST-C, ACL 60/60) benchmarks demonstrate that our model establishes new state-of-the-art quality-latency Pareto frontiers, substantially outperforming existing cascaded and static-alignment baselines.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06501
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Microdroplet Generator Surrogate Enhancement and Inverse Design Through an Uncertainty-Guided Framework
2026-11-04 13:01:32David Gabriel Harispe, Mat\'ias Gerard, Pablo A. KlerAbstract
Microfluidic droplet generation is critical for many applications, yet efficient device design in high-dimensional parameter spaces remains computationally prohibitive due to complex multiphase flow dynamics. This work presents a unified methodology that couples adaptive surrogate enhancement with simulation-driven inverse design. High-fidelity Volume-of-Fluid simulations provide ground-truth data, while neural network ensembles predict flow regimes and droplet diameters. Ensemble-based uncertainty quantification identifies epistemic uncertainty using consensus levels for regime classification and the coefficient of variation for diameter prediction, revealing that uncertainty concentrates near regime transition boundaries where physics is highly sensitive to parameter perturbations. A physics-informed enrichment strategy targets these critical zones and addresses class imbalances by deploying additional targeted simulations and retraining the surrogates forming the ensembles. A framework that integrates Particle Swarm Optimization for constrained inverse design, balancing accuracy with predictive confidence and physical consistency is therefore proposed. Validation on independent test datasets demonstrates that the enriched ensembles achieve higher accuracy, with the fraction of predictions within the 0-3% error range on droplet diameter nearly doubling, and high-error cases (above 10%) dropping substantially. The inverse design procedure reliably identifies physically realizable configurations meeting target droplet sizes. This approach significantly reduces computational costs while ensuring reliable predictions, offering a framework with potential applicability to the optimization of a broad range of microfluidic systems.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06464
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USI-Brain: Enhancing Underwater Spatial Intelligence via Spatial Data-Driven Vision-Language Modeling
2026-11-04 06:44:37Zhiliang Zhu, Zhiqiang Zhao, Xie'an Jiang, Yingxin Lai, Kangye Zheng, Dawei ZhaoAbstract
Underwater spatial reasoning depends on object boundaries and geometric cues that are obscured by scattering, color distortion, and low visibility. Existing underwater resources capture these cues through images, annotations, and depth maps, but provide fragmented supervision for vision-language models. We present a spatial data engine that connects visual appearance with object-level geometry through enhancement, 2D and geometry-assisted question generation, and expert filtering. It produces 4.27M QA pairs across five capability groups. We use this corpus to train USI-Brain and introduce an Underwater Prior-guided Rectifier (UPR) that applies gated corrections to visual features. USI-Bench evaluates the resulting capabilities with 6,525 held-out QA pairs. On its 15 task metrics, USI-Brain and USI-Brain + UPR improve over Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct by 5.76 and 7.63 points on average, respectively, using signed differences on 100-point scales. Ablations show that geometry-assisted supervision improves depth and ordering by 4.8 and 6.1 points with UPR disabled, while UPR adds 18.0 points in scene description under matched training data. Both variants use raw images at evaluation. Across NautData, UWBench, and MarineEval, USI-Brain achieves the best or joint-best score on 28 of 32 metrics. Model weights and USI-Bench will be released at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06040
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Navigational Safety of Marine Surface Vehicles in Restricted Visibility: From Intelligent Vision to Vision-Centered Multi-Sensor Fusion
2026-11-04 01:55:39Ryan Wen Liu, Fengchuan Song, Tianxiang Wang, Guobei Peng, Youngrong Kim, Xian Zhong, Hooi-Siang Kang, Maohan Liang, Junzhi Yu, Shanliang YaoAbstract
Marine surface vehicles (MSVs) have attracted considerable attention for their commercial, scientific, and military applications. Owing to their favorable performance-to-cost ratio, shipboard cameras are widely used to detect and recognize potentially hazardous situations across diverse operational scenarios. However, visual perception is inevitably degraded by restricted conditions, including irregular motion of the imaging platform, adverse weather, and long imaging distances. To improve situational awareness and navigation capabilities, complementary sensors, such as the automatic identification system (AIS), radar, and light detection and ranging (LiDAR), etc., have become essential shipboard equipment. Multi-sensor fusion can provide richer perceptual information and help ensure navigational safety of MSVs in restricted visibility. This article reviews recent progress from intelligent vision to vision-centered multi-sensor fusion for newcomers and researchers in intelligent ship navigation and intelligent waterborne transportation system (IWTS). After introducing the generation of quality-degraded images in restricted visibility, we will review intelligent vision methods for four key issues, i.e., shipboard video stabilization, visual perception enhancement, object detection and tracking, and navigable area segmentation. We then examine vision-centered multi-sensor fusion methods, including infrared-visible image fusion, radar-vision fusion, LiDAR-vision fusion, AIS-vision fusion, and other multi-sensor fusion scenarios. Open-source datasets and safety-critical applications are also summarized and discussed. Finally, we highlight open challenges and future research directions. The collected maritime datasets are available at this https URL and will be regularly updated.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05818
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DARE: Difficulty Analysis for Repair Enhancement
2026-11-04 01:10:04Jikwang Lee, Seungwook Jung, Jaechang NamAbstract
LLM-based coding agents are primarily evaluated by their solve rates. However, this metric does not reveal how difficult the solved tasks are or account for differences intask difficulty across benchmarks. Determining the difficulty of individual tasks by repeatedly running multiple agents is costly, while a predicted difficulty score alone provides limited guidance on what support an agent needs. To address these challenges, we propose DARE (Difficulty Analysis for Repair Enhancement), which integrates repair-task difficulty measurement, prediction, feature-group contribution analysis, and task-specific repair support. We define continuous task difficulty as the observed failure rate across multiple coding agents. The DARE difficulty model predicts this difficulty using 151 static features extracted from benchmark artifacts. The framework also analyzes the contributions of seven Repair-Task Feature Groups to identify the characteristics most salient to each task and uses this information to select task-specific agent support. We evaluate DARE on four benchmark partitions comprising 2,594 tasks. The difficulty model's aligned predictions achieve Spearman's $\rho$ = .476-.621 on held-out partitions, and the most salient Feature Groups vary across tasks and benchmarks. Furthermore, coding-agent experiments show improved repair success when support is matched to each task's salient Feature Group. These findings demonstrate that difficulty prediction and interpretation can lead to practical improvements in automated program repair (APR), while also providing a basis for difficulty-stratified agent evaluation, cross-benchmark comparisons, and identifying areas of repair capability that warrant further improvement.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05797
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Any Forcing: Any-Step Generality and One-Step Stability for Autoregressive Video Generation
2026-10-30 16:56:42Jiahua Xu, Yijie Fang, Nannan Wang, Xunhao Lin, Li Cao, Lei Hao, Mingrui Zhu, Fei Gao, Xinbo GaoAbstract
Autoregressive video generation enables efficient inference through streaming prediction. However, existing methods are typically restricted to fixed sampling steps, limiting the flexibility to balance generation quality and efficiency, while one-step generation suffers from degraded visual quality and error accumulation over long sequences, leading to content drift and generation collapse. To address these issues, we propose Any Forcing, a unified framework for achieving Any-Step Generality and One-Step Stability. Specifically, we introduce a unified adversarial discriminator that jointly performs real-distribution alignment, inter-step consistency alignment, and first-frame quality enhancement, enabling flexible sampling while preserving one-step generation quality. Furthermore, we propose a training-free adaptive long-term memory selection mechanism that selects historical states based on global semantic relevance and local value contribution, while remapping their temporal positions to preserve temporal relationships within the memory cache, thereby enabling stable one-step long-video generation. Experiments demonstrate that Any Forcing achieves high-quality and stable one-step autoregressive video generation, achieving 20.9 FPS and 24.7 FPS for short and long video generation on a single H100 GPU, respectively.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.42031
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Enhancing Medical Lesion Segmentation via Several Simple Modules
2026-10-30 12:26:57Ruichen Li, Zhao YaoAbstract
This work introduces three lightweight enhancement modules for medical lesion segmentation to improve clinical applicability, particularly under data-scarce and computationally constrained environments. Current mainstream methods struggle with the lack of high-quality annotations for rare pathologies, which often leads to severe morphological distortions during inference, despite achieving seemingly ideal DSC scores. Furthermore, the isolated development of individual segmentation tasks restricts cross-domain methodological innovation, underscoring the need for leveraging shared knowledge across different lesions within the same anatomical region. However, constrained access to historical data and annotations hinders efficient knowledge extraction and triggers catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new classes. To address these challenges, we first propose DT-Morph Combined Loss with continuous spatial pooling to optimize differentiable topological structures and boundary continuity. Second, we introduce 3D Group Prompt, which extracts domain-universal knowledge via curated volumetric image-mask alignment prompts together with text prompts built on SAT baseline. Finally, we replace conventional output layers with Many-to-One Conditional Segmentation Head equipped with synonym-resolved routing, which brings negligible computational cost and enables fast incremental learning for new categories without sacrificing performance on old tasks. Ablation studies on abdominal and extra-abdominal datasets covering both organ and lesion segmentation verify the efficacy of our modules.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41652
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PRIN: A Perceptual-Structural Retinex-Inspired Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement
2026-10-30 06:54:22Qiyi Xie, Wei Chen Ng, Ziyao Li, Yuning Wu, Huasen Wu, Tianshi Miao, Jian Ding TanAbstract
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) focuses not only on visibility recovery but also on preserving structurally meaningful content and perceptual naturalness. Existing learning-based methods may achieve favorable pixel-wise fidelity while still producing over-smoothed textures, color deviations, or spatially incoherent illumination. Retinex-inspired methods provide interpretable decomposition into reflectance and illumination components, however, the asymmetric restoration roles of these components are rarely encoded through branch-specific frequency-domain refinement. To address this issue, we propose a Perceptual-Structural Retinex-Inspired Network (PRIN), which integrates Retinex priors with restoration-role-aware enhancement. PRIN employs a shared encoder and asymmetric decoders to estimate reflectance and illumination components. The reflectance branch performs attention-guided and edge-aware wavelet refinement to preserve textures and boundaries, whereas the illumination branch promotes spatially coherent brightness adjustment. After the recomposition of reflectance and illumination branches, a curve-based post-composition enhancement head calibrates residual tone and exposure deviations. Experiments on LOL-v1, LOL-v2-Syn, and LOL-v2-Real show that the proposed network ties for the best structural similarity index (SSIM) and obtains the second-lowest learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) on LOL-v1, achieves the best SSIM and LPIPS on LOL-v2-Syn, and obtains the highest peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and the second-lowest LPIPS on LOL-v2-Real.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41338
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PRISM: Pushing the Frontier of Deep Think via Process Reward Model-Guided Inference
2026-10-29 15:18:43Rituraj Sharma, Weiyuan Chen, Noah Provenzano, Tu VuAbstract
DEEPTHINK methods improve reasoning by generating, refining, and aggregating populations of candidate solutions, which enables strong performance on complex mathematical and scientific tasks. However, existing frameworks can still suffer from unreliable correctness signals during inference, which creates a population- enhancement bottleneck where deeper deliberation amplifies errors, suppresses correct minority solutions, and yields weak returns to additional compute. In this paper, we introduce a functional decomposition of DEEPTHINK systems and propose PRISM, a Process Reward Model (PRM)-guided inference algorithm that uses step-level verification to guide resampling, proposal acceptance, and solution aggregation. During refinement, PRISM uses PRM scores to guide population resampling and stochastic local refinement, which concentrates computation on higher-quality reasoning while preserving diversity. When paired with PRM- score-vote, a PRM-guided aggregation method, PRISM is competitive with or outperforms existing DEEPTHINK methods, reaching 90.0%, 75.4%, and 71.4% with gpt-oss-20b on AIME25, HMMT25, and GPQA Diamond, respectively, while exceeding gpt-oss-120b. Additionally, our analysis shows that PRISM produces consistent net-directional correction during refinement and maintains competitive accuracy when the initial population contains few correct candidates.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02479
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FARE: Factor-Aware Retrieval with Error-Guided Fusion for Retail Forecasting
2026-10-29 14:37:00Chenghao Gu, Zhuokang Shen, Shenghao Wu, Tingxuan Zhu, Weiyi Luo, Haifeng TangAbstract
Retail sales forecasting underpins inventory planning, yet promotions and calendar events reshape short-term demand. Although each factor usually has historical occurrences, the complete factor combination of a target week often has few precedents. The challenge is therefore to retrieve informative partial matches and weight them by their reliability, which varies across series. We propose FARE(Factor-Aware Retrieval with Error-Guided Fusion), which ranks historical weeks separately for each known target-week factor and merges the selected weeks into a factor reference under a fixed budget. Guided by shrunk errors from completed development weeks and the current disagreement among candidates, a first gate mixes this factor reference with a shape reference from similar sales histories, and a second gate controls how strongly the mixture corrects a backbone forecast. Both gates remain fixed during testing. On Favorita, M5, Rossmann, and Rohlik, FARE reduces the weighted absolute percentage error (WAPE) of five backbones by 11.46%, 4.06%, 14.63%, and 10.16% on average. With Chronos-2 frozen, FARE also outperforms conventional and existing enhancement methods, including supervised residual correction and retrieval augmentation. Code is available at this https URL .
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40160
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