Few-step sampling reduces the cost of streaming video generation. Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) supervises few-step generators with a separate fake-score network, which adds training memory and computation and must track the evolving generator. We extend APEX to streaming video by using condition shifting to estimate the velocity field of the generated distribution within the generator. The original text condition selects generation, while a shifted condition selects fake estimation using the same parameters. This removes the independent fake network while retaining S2-Avatar's frozen reference teacher, Self-Replay Forcing, and perceptual regularization. We evaluate APEX on 180-second videos using three backbone evaluations per block and a one-step spatial Refiner, with a 70-case human study and a 320-case StreamAV-Bench comparison. Compared with S2-Avatar, APEX achieves higher video instruction fulfillment on the Progressive track (3.856 versus 3.831) and higher visual aesthetics across both tracks (0.641898 versus 0.632606). Human raters favor APEX most strongly on instruction following, with +30.0% net preference, followed by consistency and video quality at +4.3% each. Motion quality favors S2-Avatar, audiovisual synchronization is predominantly tied, and usability is unchanged. Separate measurements under matched training settings show 4.4% lower peak allocated GPU memory per GPU and 9.2% shorter mean iteration time than DMD.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14033
Flow-matching models can produce high-quality image restorations, but their learned dynamics may amplify small input perturbations and make reconstructions unstable. We introduce LipsFlower to reduce this amplification. We derive stability bounds for Flow-from-$Y$, which initializes the ordinary differential equation from a noise-perturbed observation, as well as for observation-conditioned posterior sampling, which conditions the velocity field on the observation throughout integration. Based on this analysis, we develop LipHDiT, a Lipschitz-aware hourglass diffusion transformer that serves as the vector-field architecture of LipsFlower. LipHDiT incorporates stabilized approximate spectral normalization, bounded modulation, and convex residual mixing. We also use adversarial finite-radius gain regularization at sampled interpolation states to penalize excessive sensitivity to the state and, for conditional sampling, the observation. We test both formulations on blind face restoration, measuring adversarial robustness and the perceptual quality of the reconstructions. LipsFlower reduces perturbation amplification while keeping restoration quality competitive with the evaluated baselines. These results suggest that Lipschitz-aware flow matching can improve the stability of generative image restoration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13995
Under a fixed frame budget, video understanding with vision-language models (VLMs) depends on whether the sampled frames provide sufficient evidence for the question. Sufficient frame evidence supports direct answering, whereas less informative observations may benefit from reasoning that connects the available cues. We introduce EVAThink, which enhances video understanding through evidence sufficiency-guided training for adaptive thinking. First, Recoverable Evidence Gap Mining constructs evidence-dense and evidence-sparse video views that share the same question and answer under an identical frame budget. It retains pairs where sparse views yield lower direct-answer accuracy than dense views but benefit from explicit reasoning, providing supervision for response-mode selection. Second, Evidence-Guided Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning uses stage-specific rewards to guide training with evidence-based mode preferences and then refine response efficiency, while first-token advantage regularization mitigates mode collapse. Trained on only 6.7K curated samples, EVAThink consistently improves upon the base model across video understanding benchmarks under both 32- and 64-frame budgets, while outperforming strong baselines on average. The code, model, and datasets are available at \href{this https URL}{EVAThink}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13907
Continual learning suffers from catastrophic forgetting, leading to the loss of past knowledge and unstable adaptation across task streams. Existing approaches typically address this issue through replay buffers, architectural changes, or additional regularization terms. We argue that forgetting is a consequence of unstable learning dynamics, which may benefit from an optimizer-level solution. The main challenge is that learning dynamics are time-dependent, as demonstrated by empirical phenomena such as the stability gap. First, we formally prove that, for distance-based classifiers, bounded parameter drift guarantees bounded margin erosion under a local score-stability condition. Based on this insight, we propose STABLE, a primal-dual optimizer with adaptive drift control. STABLE enforces a drift budget by increasing the dual variable when the budget is violated and decreasing it otherwise. This results in high stability without penalizing plasticity. Experiments on long-horizon unimodal streams and CLIP-based multimodal streams show that vanilla PEFT baselines trained with STABLE match or outperform specialized continual learning methods. In the multimodal setting, STABLE further preserves zero-shot transfer, matching or exceeding dedicated multimodal continual learning methods. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.10655
In multimodal learning, modality imbalance often lets one modality dominate optimization and keeps the model from fully exploiting cross-modal interactions. Balance-oriented methods such as the Multimodal Competition Regularizer (MCR) perform well by alleviating this imbalance during training. These dynamic balancing methods, however, mainly adjust modality contributions and do not consider how imbalance affects the formation of synergistic information during fusion. Synergy is a major source of multimodal advantage, because it is predictive gain that cannot be recovered from unimodal evidence alone. We propose the Multimodal Synergistic Competition Regularizer (MSCR), a fusion method that jointly promotes balanced modality utilization and the discovery of synergistic information. MSCR has two complementary objectives. An anti-dominance objective suppresses excessive unimodal influence and leaves room for synergistic information, and a synergy objective encourages the fused predictor to outperform a non-synergistic unimodal reference. An adaptive gate further concentrates the regularization on samples that need stronger collaborative modeling. Experiments on five benchmarks show that MSCR consistently improves performance over MCR and strengthens synergistic capability. It raises conditional recovery, the accuracy of the fused prediction on samples that the unimodal predictors misclassify, as well as the share of the model's output that InterSHAP attributes to cross-modal interactions. Its gain in conditional recovery persists when the fusion module is Transformer-based. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24395
Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an efficient representation for novel view synthesis, offering fast differentiable rendering and high visual fidelity, and has increasingly been extended to surface reconstruction. However, the relationship between depth information and reconstruction error remains insufficiently explored, limiting the principled design of geometric optimization strategies. To fill the above gap, we propose DepthGS, a depth-guided Gaussian splatting framework. We derive theoretical relations between depth discrepancies and reconstruction error under single-view and multi-view settings, and rigorously establish corresponding upper bounds on reconstruction error. The above analysis informs the design of adaptive regularization strategies in both single-view and multi-view optimization. More specifically, for single-view optimization, we propose a depth-difference-guided adaptive normal regularization strategy that modulates the normal constraint strength using a geometric reliability weight computed from local depth differences. For multi-view optimization, we introduce a cross-view depth consistency regularization strategy that promotes consistency between neighboring-view depth maps and the corresponding depth predictions obtained by transforming the current view's depth predictions into those neighboring views. Extensive experiments on DTU, Mip-NeRF360, and Tanks and Temples demonstrate that DepthGS achieves competitive performance in both surface reconstruction and novel view synthesis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13628
Retrieval-augmented language model systems generally select context by query-conditioned relevance. We argue that long-lived AI systems require a second operator: activation-conditioned memory availability. We specify an architecture in which request and goal cues seed an authorized memory graph, activation and fan attenuation allocate a bounded traversal frontier, retrieved entities recursively emit cues, and a typed evidence graph is reconstructed before generation. The specification yields five architectural consequences about candidate selection, traversal control, graph regularization, evidence reconstruction, and reinforcement. We derive implementation-level cost estimates and define ablations, failure conditions, and a reproducible evaluation protocol. The central claim is narrowed or falsified if a simpler graph reranker matches full traversal on causal and temporal recovery under equal budgets. This architecture-and-analysis preprint reports no benchmark measurements. If the claim holds, retrieval returns the evidence path that makes a memory available, not only a ranked list.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13127
Knowledge editing has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently updating embedded knowledge in large language models (LLMs). It first computes an ideal target hidden state that steers the LLM toward the new output, and then edits the model parameters so that the original hidden state is mapped to this target. While most existing methods focus on the second stage of parameter editing in preserving other knowledge, we find that the upstream construction of the target hidden state also plays an important role in allocating the model's limited capacity space. We first establish a theoretical connection between interference in the parameter space and interference between target hidden states, showing that the two are positively correlated. Building on this insight, we propose a simple yet effective $\ell_1$ regularization method that prunes away unnecessary ``tentacles'' of each knowledge vector, retaining only the essential components. With fewer extraneous tentacles, each edit affects less other knowledge, enabling better coexistence. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method. Code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12995
Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and dynamic range for uncooperative spacecraft pose estimation, but models trained on synthetic event streams must generalize to the noise, background activity, and contrast variation of physical sensors. We present a comparative systems study of two independently developed approaches to synthetic-to-real, event-based 6-DoF spacecraft pose estimation. The first is a modular pipeline that combines learned keypoint detection and unlabeled target-domain adaptation with geometry-based pose recovery and temporal smoothing. The second directly regresses translation and rotation from global and cropped event representations using an apparent-scale cue, physics-motivated synthetic corruptions, and feature-consistency regularization. We evaluate both systems under the same SPARK 2026 hidden-test protocol on the real-event split of SPADES, with predictions for all test frames. The results reveal a component-wise reversal concealed by the aggregate challenge score: direct regression reduces orientation error by 22.7% (1.1767 to 0.9101 rad) and obtains a 13.4% lower composite score, whereas the modular pipeline reduces relative translation error by 78.7% (0.1335 to 0.0285). Archived configurations and a qualitative failure case identify plausible explanations for these complementary error profiles, without isolating their causes. These findings motivate a testable hybrid design that combines direct orientation estimation with geometry-constrained translation recovery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09717
Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) has evolved from 2D image-based approaches to multi-modal methods that leverage the complementary nature of RGB images and 3D point clouds. Among these, memory bank-based methods, which identify anomalies by the discrepancy between each query patch feature and its nearest normal prototype, have proven particularly effective. However, two limitations remain: (i) employing frozen pretrained encoders yields insufficient discrimination between normal and anomalous features due to the domain gap, while existing contrastive learning-based adaptation struggles to capture the spatial relationships required for precise localization; and (ii) pixel-level anomaly maps interpolated from patch-level distance scores remain coarse, lacking fine-grained detail. To address these limitations, we propose EPAR (Embedding Predictive Adaptation and Refinement). We adapt encoders by predicting the embeddings of masked regions to capture spatial relationships, together with patch-level Variance-Invariance-Covariance (VIC) regularization, resolving the poor discriminability between normal and anomalous features caused by the domain gap. We further propose a Noise Suppression Network that refines coarse maps by learning the relational discrepancy between each patch feature and its nearest normal prototype, rather than the anomaly's appearance. This relational signal remains valid for unseen real defects, despite being learned from synthetic anomalies. EPAR demonstrates strong practical applicability, excelling in few-shot settings and improving AUPRO@1% on MVTec 3D-AD and Eyecandies by +1.8% and +1.9%, respectively.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09521
Pretrained vision-language models and diffusion generators have driven rapid progress in brain-to-image generation, while EEG-based reconstruction is still constrained by low signal-to-noise ratio and cross-subject semantic shifts. Zero-shot cross-subject reconstruction poses even greater challenges: EEG semantic embeddings learned from source subjects deviate from the manifold of image embeddings of the unseen target subject, particularly when neither target labels nor target image embeddings are available. To address this issue, we introduce the Semantic Preservation and Subspace Calibration (SPSC) framework, which first uses Object Mask Contrastive Regularization (OMCR) with object identity for backend training, and then constructs Subspace Candidate Gate (SCG) to achieve label-free semantic correction for target subjects during inference. Specifically, OMCR regularizes the conditioning space with object-level positive samples to preserve object-level feature neighborhoods within the reconstruction prior and low-level branch, while SCG exploits training image prototypes and batch statistics of unlabeled target EEG to select candidates for each task within subspaces of image prototypes. Under the leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) setting across ten subjects on the THINGS-EEG dataset, SPSC improves the cross-subject reconstruction from 0.552 to 0.713 on CLIP and from 0.612 to 0.745 on Alex.5. These significant gains indicate that the semantically calibrated conditions can better support generation for the target subjects under label-free inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09380
Reward-based fine-tuning of flow models requires effectively promoting high-reward and suppressing low-reward samples, while maintaining training stability over many rounds of iterative updates. Iterative reward fine-tuning provides a simple starting point, but the positive reward weights give no explicit unfitting signal, and repeated reweighting concentrates the distribution and causes collapse. We propose Stable Signed Flow Reinforcement (SIFR), which replaces the reward weights by signed advantages to supply the missing unfitting signal, and constrains the velocity drift from a reference model to stabilize the updates, with a Lagrange multiplier that adapts the regularization strength to a prescribed drift budget. We further show that existing flow RL methods fall within this framework: they implicitly minimize the signed loss, differing in their regularization choices. We validate SIFR on SD3.5 Medium (2.5B) and FLUX.2 Klein (9B) and scale it to Cosmos 3 Super Text2Image (64B): across all 12 backbone--reward pairs with preference and rule-based rewards, it matches or exceeds existing methods, reaches their peak rewards much faster, and keeps improving over long training where they plateau or collapse.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09175
LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection (L3OD) is a fundamental 3D perception task, yet its performance is often compromised by domain shifts arising from diverse sensor configurations and environmental conditions. Existing Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods primarily leverage self-supervision in the spatial domain, yet they frequently confound semantic content with domain style due to the sparse, non-Euclidean nature of point clouds. To overcome this limitation, we propose FIND (Frequency INvariance Disentanglement), a novel TTA framework that precisely disentangles domain-invariant content from domain-specific interference within the frequency domain. Our methodology utilizes B-Spline fitting to construct locally adaptive filters integrated into a dual-stream architecture: an Invariant Stream extracts robust features to guide pseudo-labeling, while a Specific Stream enforces consistency against domain perturbations. By combining invariance-driven alignment with stability-guided regularization, our approach dynamically extracts robust domain-invariant features while suppressing domain-specific interference. Extensive experiments on cross-dataset adaptation and robust corruption benchmarks demonstrate that FIND significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09170
Parametric human body models such as the Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model provide compact representations of human shape and pose, but their reconstructions remain affected by both errors in estimated latent parameters and limitations in the decoder's expressive capacity. We propose a framework for refining these reconstructions by exploiting the geometric discrepancy between an initial decoded surface and a target mesh, without requiring vertex correspondences between them. The framework comprises three complementary approaches. Latent-VaRefine uses varifold distance gradients to correct the estimated latent code while preserving the original parametric representation. Vertex-VaRefine processes multiscale varifold-gradient features with a DiffusionNet backbone to predict vertex displacements in a canonical pose, yielding an approximately pose-equivariant refinement pipeline. ElaOpt directly optimizes surface deformations under elastic regularization and normal direction constraints. On AMASS, Vertex-VaRefine reduces the mean vertex-to-vertex error of OmniFit reconstructions from 1.181 to 0.342 cm, a 71.0 percent reduction, while combining Latent-VaRefine with ElaOpt reduces the asymmetric Chamfer distance of ArtEq reconstructions from 1.681 to 0.717 cm, a 57.3 percent reduction. Evaluations with SMPL-H and SMPL-X demonstrate the framework's adaptability to different body models, while additional experiments on remeshed targets and raw scans assess its robustness to changes in discretization and geometry beyond the parametric model. These results highlight the complementary strengths of latent space correction, learned vertex refinement, and elastic optimization, offering different trade-offs between preserving the model parameterization and improving geometric fidelity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03285
This paper analyzes a bilevel formulation for learning the regularization parameter of combined local-global (CLG) optical flow models. The lower-level problem computes the flow from a Lucas--Kanade data term and a quadratic or total variation (TV) regularizer, and the upper-level problem selects the parameter that minimizes the squared distance to a ground-truth flow. The setting is finite-dimensional, and a full-rank assumption makes the lower-level solution unique. For the quadratic model we derive sufficient conditions for the existence of an optimal parameter, for every optimal parameter to be positive, and for strict local optimality. For TV regularization an optimal parameter always exists, because the lower-level solution vanishes for large parameters, and we give a sufficient condition for positivity that accounts for the coupling of the two flow components through the local structure tensors. Synthetic examples illustrate the conditions, including cases in which they fail.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08359
Fine-grained, bimanual dexterous manipulation remains a foundational challenge in robotics. Embodiment gaps hinder accurate kinematic mapping, and visual tracking alone does not regulate contact forces. To address these limitations, we propose a tactile-driven adaptation strategy designed to enable fine-grained manipulation on top of teleoperation pipelines. Instantiated within our bimanual dexterous framework, DexTeleop-0, this strategy introduces a real-time optimization loop that adds robot-side contact corrections to human tracking commands using fingertip feedback. By estimating contact positions and forces, the system dynamically computes localized corrections using a contact-stiffness approximation and the kinematic Jacobian, with per-contact vector force tracking, soft predicted-contact-moment regularization, and bounded hand-joint residuals. We evaluate this tactile-driven adaptation strategy across both simulated environments and real-world hardware. Controlled simulation replay yields final-stage success rates of 91% for Ball Assembly and 62% for Stir in Cup, versus 88% and 49% for force tracking alone. Fixed-input replay on two hand types, seven-operator teleoperation, and external-force traces further assess contact assistance. The open-sourced project page can be found at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23431
Accurate 4D reconstruction remains challenging: jointly estimating camera motion, scene geometry, and non-rigid deformation entails highly nonconvex optimization, making global optimality difficult to guarantee. We present XM4D, a framework for accurate and efficient 4D reconstruction built upon certifiably globally optimal geometric optimization. By separating the estimation of camera motion from non-rigid deformation, we formulate both stages as structured quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQP) that admit semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations and verifiable global optimality certificates. For camera motion estimation, we lift static point tracks into 3D using foundational depth prediction models and formulate a scaled bundle adjustment problem that jointly estimates camera poses, depth scales, and static landmarks. By analytically eliminating translations and landmarks, we reduce the problem to a QCQP over scaled rotations. For non-rigid reconstruction, we represent dynamic motion using an embedded deformation graph (EDG) and show that its tracking, rigidity, and temporal regularization objectives similarly reduce to a rotation-only QCQP. Both problems admit SDP relaxations that we solve efficiently with a GPU-accelerated Burer-Monteiro solver based on Riemannian optimization. The recovered geometry further initializes dynamic Gaussian splatting for photometric refinement. Extensive experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate accurate camera motion estimation on both static and dynamic scenes, efficient optimization that scales to thousands of frames, and state-of-the-art novel-view rendering quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07902
LiDAR is a critical sensor for autonomous driving and robotics, yet it remains vulnerable to adverse conditions such as fog, rain, transparent objects, and low-reflectance surfaces. Full-waveform LiDAR (FWL) addresses these limitations by capturing the complete return waveform as a histogram, preserving rich reflection characteristics including multi-path echoes and weak signals. While recent Transformer-based approaches have demonstrated promise on FWL data, two fundamental bottlenecks remain: high computational cost from redundant tokens in low-intensity background regions, and limited generalization due to scarce annotated training data. We address both bottlenecks by exploiting the physical structure inherent to FWL data. First, we propose FWL-ToPM, a token pruning and merging mechanism that leverages intensity distributions to selectively reduce tokens while retaining critical waveform content. Second, we introduce FWLAug, a data augmentation framework designed as a regularization method that preserves waveform structure, retaining the Time-of-Flight waveform of each ray and the frustum geometry, to improve generalization to unseen scenes. Evaluated on the Ghost-FWL benchmark, FWL-ToPM achieves over 8 times speedup at real-time throughput alongside a nearly 9-point F1 gain over the prior state of the art, establishing the first real-time FWL Transformer that simultaneously improves accuracy. FWLAug further improves performance on both the standard benchmark and an out-of-distribution test set of unseen scenes. Together, these methods push FWL-based perception toward practical deployment. The code and the OOD dataset are publicly available and can be accessed via the project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07613
Physically based inverse rendering decomposes appearance into materials and illumination, an ambiguous problem for which learned material predictions provide useful prior information. Most existing methods incorporate these cues through auxiliary regularization losses, which alter the optimization objective and require balancing their influence against photometric fitting. We propose a prior-guided material reparameterization that uses the predicted feature relationships to restrict the optimization space while leaving the objective unchanged. We fuse multi-view material predictions onto a mesh and construct a permutohedral lattice in the resulting prior feature space. Surface points with similar predictions share material variables, which are optimized jointly with geometry and illumination using a purely photometric objective. Experiments with two learned predictors on three synthetic benchmarks and Stanford-ORB demonstrate improved material decomposition and relighting. Our method improves relighting PSNR by 1.5-2.5 dB over the strongest evaluated mesh-based baseline on Synthetic4Relight and TensoIR-Synthetic, and outperforms a regularization loss using the same prior in controlled comparisons. We further show that our reparameterization pools noisy photometric gradients, producing updates that are more consistent across sampled views. This consistency enables a shortened joint optimization schedule that takes less than a minute while retaining relighting quality above all evaluated baselines on TensoIR-Synthetic.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07573
In time-series forecasting, rollout errors are not merely one-step fitting discrepancies: once fed back into the evolving state, they can perturb future predictions. We formalize this effect through local rollout consistency, which compares the next prediction produced under teacher forcing with that produced under free running. In principle, this consistency can be enforced directly by tracking the residual-induced perturbation of the next state. In practice, however, the residual-to-state alignment operator is often difficult to design when the input state and output block have different dimensions, heterogeneous components, or architecture-dependent layouts. We therefore use a first-order local surrogate that penalizes the Jacobian-vector product of the predictor along the actual feedback perturbation, suppressing precisely the directions through which self-generated errors remain visible to future predictions. We further give the same loss a geometric interpretation near a predictive manifold: by controlling residual-induced directions that probe the normal bundle, the objective yields theoretical conditions under which free-running trajectories remain inside a stability tube around the manifold. Experiments on time series forecasting tasks support this view, showing that the proposed regularization improves predictive accuracy. More broadly, our results suggest a training principle for time-series forecasters and sequential predictors: a model should not only make small one-step errors, but also learn not to let its own errors echo into the future. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07473