Hyperspectral images (HSI) possess discriminating spectral characteristics with respect to land utilization due to high-dimensional information. Recently, unsupervised representation learning using graph neural networks has unveiled these utilization-specific complex spectral relations. This article has three main contributions. First, it proposes an index, the Mean Absolute Local Neighborhood Inverse Spectral Index (MALNISI), which measures the similarity between two pixels based on their neighborhood information. The index is used to construct a weighted adjacency matrix, giving the HSI a graph structure. Second, it proposes an upgraded Graph Attention Network that learns compact latent representations of hyperspectral data from the constructed graph. In this network, an enhanced multi-head attention mechanism incorporates the MALNISI weights as an auxiliary feature to emphasize learned attention between neighboring pixels. To alleviate over-smoothing and preserve fine-grained spectral details, the architecture integrates residual connections, skip projections, and feature normalization, which together enhance representation capability, stabilize learning, and accelerate convergence. Third, it proposes a weighted contrastive loss function that incorporates neighborhood-aware MALNISI between connected pixels, encouraging strongly connected pixels in the high-dimensional space to remain close in the latent space, and weakly connected pixels to stay apart. The resulting discriminative low-dimensional embeddings are then clustered using spectral clustering. Experimental analysis on six benchmark HSI datasets demonstrates the efficiency and necessity of the three aforementioned contributions, and the comparative study highlights superior performance over fourteen state-of-the-art approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17199
Recent music foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in music representation learning, yet most existing approaches rely on Transformer architectures whose quadratic attention complexity introduces substantial computational and memory overhead when modeling long-duration music recordings. In this work, we propose MusicRWKV, a multimodal music representation learning framework built upon the RWKV architecture. MusicRWKV jointly models waveform, spectrogram, and metadata information within a unified self-supervised learning framework. To improve efficiency for long musical sequences, we introduce an invertible compression module that reduces sequence length while preserving reconstruction capability. A FiLM-based conditioning strategy is employed to facilitate modality-aware representation learning without introducing expensive cross-attention operations. We further investigate the integration of Soft ROSA as a differentiable retrieval mechanism for neural-symbolic interaction. Experimental evaluation across a diverse collection of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed RWKV-based architecture can be effectively adapted to heterogeneous music understanding tasks. A controlled pretraining ablation shows that Soft ROSA improves validation performance, while layer-wise telemetry analysis reveals a progressive transition from distributed retrieval to selective retrieval in deeper network layers. These results suggest that RWKV provides a promising architectural alternative to Transformer-based models for multimodal music understanding.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16718
Hypergraphs capture groupwise relationships among multiple nodes and often exhibit tree-like structures. Although hyperbolic space is well suited for modeling such structures, simply extending existing hypergraph representation learning (HRL) methods to hyperbolic space does not consistently improve performance. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between node structural properties and hyperbolic embedding radii and find that bridge nodes tend to lie closer to the center in graphs, whereas this relationship is not consistently observed in hypergraphs. We further find that conventional bridge score estimation may fail to capture the groupwise connectivity of hypergraphs. Motivated by these findings, we propose HyBridge, a self-supervised hyperbolic HRL framework that (1) estimates node bridge scores by considering the external connectivity of individual hyperedges, (2) learns node and hyperedge embeddings through hyperbolic hypergraph encoding, (3) guides node radial positions according to their bridge scores, and (4) employs contrastive learning to preserve node discriminability. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world hypergraphs demonstrate that HyBridge outperforms 22 competing methods, achieving performance improvements of up to 9.82% in node classification. For reproducibility, we provide the code at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16351
Expert annotation remains a major bottleneck in agricultural image classification, where collecting images is often easier than obtaining reliable labels from domain specialists. Self-supervised learning can reduce this dependence by pretraining transferable representations on unlabelled imagery. Contrastive and bootstrap methods provide two established but distinct training signals, motivating an empirical study of a formulation that applies both signals within one representation path under severe downstream label scarcity. We present Contrastive Bootstrap Representation Learning (CBRL), which jointly optimises SimCLR-style NT-Xent contrastive learning and bidirectional BYOL-style exponential-moving-average target prediction within a shared online projection space. Using a ViT-L/16 backbone and 10% of the downstream labels, we report single-seed point estimates on four primary agricultural test benchmarks plus an exploratory 33-image New Plant Diseases evaluation. CBRL records the highest macro-F1 point estimate on the four primary benchmarks. On DeepWeeds, its 79.77% test macro-F1 is 32.29 points above the random-initialisation, label-only baseline and 15.78 points above the next-highest comparison point estimate; on PlantVillage, its 98.14% macro-F1 is 10.43 and 0.43 points higher, respectively. On PlantDoc, however, all methods fail to reach practically useful performance. These results identify the evaluated joint formulation as a promising candidate for label-limited transfer, but they do not establish objective synergy, statistical superiority, or robustness across stochastic runs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.15610
Graph learning still lacks a broadly reusable input interface comparable to patches in vision or tokens in language. Unlike images or text, graphs are irregular, vary in size and density, and are invariant under many equivalent node labelings, making it difficult to standardize inputs across tasks and architectures. We introduce G2Image, a fixed-budget graph imaging framework that converts each graph into two complementary image-like views. TopoGrid provides a stable topological view by encoding an intrinsic bifiltration as a compact multipersistence surface grid, while GraphGrid provides a higher-bandwidth structural view by aggregating edge densities between groups defined by intrinsic node scores. Both views are permutation-invariant and come with resolution-controlled stability guarantees. Because the resulting representations are fixed-size tensors, they can be processed by lightweight 2D encoders and aligned through a supervised cross-view contrastive objective. Across graph classification and molecular prediction benchmarks, G2Image achieves strong average performance among the compared methods, improves over single-view and standard fusion variants, and extends to attribute-rich molecular graphs without changing the overall architecture. These results suggest that fixed-budget graph images offer a practical and reusable interface for graph representation learning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14750
Energy-based models (EBMs) define a distribution through a scalar energy, $p_\theta(x)\propto\exp(-E_\theta(x))$, and are usually presented as one model family among many. This tutorial has a broader goal: beyond introducing EBMs, it uses them as a single lens that connects the different aspects of machine learning. Any EBM is specified by three choices, the energy, which determines what the model represents; the inference procedure, which samples from or optimizes the energy; and the learning method, which fits the energy to data. We first develop these components, including sampling, variational inference, and learning by maximum likelihood, noise contrastive estimation, pseudolikelihood, score matching, and adversarial training, and show that the learning methods share one contrastive structure. We then show that discriminative models, generative models such as GANs, normalizing flows, diffusion and autoregressive models, representation learning methods such as contrastive learning, word2vec, BERT, denoising auto-encoders, and diffusion representations, reinforcement learning with EBM policies and world models, inverse reinforcement learning, and planning, as well as inference-time computation with verifiers, are all EBMs that differ in these three choices, mostly in how they handle the partition function and sampling. This view explains existing methods, organizes them into a common framework, and suggests new algorithms by replacing one component while keeping the others, with composition of energies as a principled way to combine learned models at inference time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14383
Remote sensing increasingly captures the Earth's surface through complementary sensors such as SAR and optical, yet ground-truth annotations remain scarce, limiting supervised approaches. Self-supervised learning (SSL) addresses the label scarcity, and cross-modal SSL further exploits the complementarity between co-located sensors, but existing cross-modal frameworks align modalities mostly through global image-level representations or treat them as largely redundant, leaving their fine-grained complementary structure underexploited. We propose CroCoMAE, a cross-modal SSL framework for SAR-optical remote sensing that unifies contrastive learning and masked image modeling within a ViT-based architecture, operating at two complementary levels. At the image level, an intra-modality contrastive loss on the class token yields globally discriminative, augmentation-invariant representations. At the patch level, masked image modeling drives fine-grained per-modality representations, while a cross-modal contrastive objective aligns a shared subspace across SAR and optical patch tokens, leaving the complementary subspace unconstrained to retain modality-specific information. On two SAR-optical benchmarks covering scene classification and semantic segmentation, CroCoMAE improves over uni-modal SSL baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art cross-modal frameworks in most configurations, with gains in both single-modality and multi-modal evaluation across varying label regimes and the largest improvements on semantic segmentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14124
Multimodal remote sensing pretraining commonly relies on exact instance-level correspondence across modalities, implicitly treating strictly paired observations as a prerequisite for learning transferable representations. In this work, we revisit this assumption by relaxing cross-modal correspondence from the instance level to the semantic level. We introduce Semantic Pairing (SemPair), a pairing-relaxed pretraining strategy that replaces exact instance pairs with class-consistent cross-instance pairs. To characterize the effect of correspondence relaxation, we formulate a latent-factor model that separates cross-modal dependence into shared semantic structure and instance-specific correlation, showing that SemPair preserves the former while marginalizing instance-specific cross-modal correlations in expectation. We further introduce Mixed Pairing (MixPair) as a controlled interpolation between semantic and exact pairing to study correspondence granularity along a continuous spectrum. Extensive experiments consistently show that SemPair achieves transfer performance comparable to exact pairing (ExaPair), while MixPair reveals a non-monotonic relationship between downstream transfer and the instance-pairing ratio. These results demonstrate that exact instance correspondence is not a prerequisite for effective multimodal remote sensing pretraining and establish cross-modal correspondence granularity as an important design dimension for transferable multimodal representation learning. More broadly, this finding suggests a practical route toward scaling multimodal pretraining with reduced dependence on costly instance-aligned data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13807
Smart industrial solutions that can address multiple tasks require models that understand the underlying processes. We examine representation learning for modeling the injection moulding process as an example of such solutions. We consider its data efficiency and multi-modal benefit compared to classical machine learning alternatives. To this end, we synthesize a process-informed dataset based on a real reference cycle of an Erlanger Träger part. We then introduce MouldIt, a temporal convolution and attention based variational autoencoder that reconstructs in-mould signals, while classifying parts as acceptable or as one of our synthetic failure modes. We evaluate MouldIt on two tasks, known-class classification and unknown-class detection, across nine dataset sizes in single-modal and multi-modal settings. We compare it with an accept-all baseline and the classical methods k-nearest neighbors, logistic regression, random forests, and principal component analysis, which we adapt to support both tasks. MouldIt outperforms classical methods across both tasks from 4000 cycles in the single-modal setting and from 2000 cycles in the multi-modal setting. It achieves part sorting losses of 6.0 $\pm$ 0.7% and 1.0 $\pm$ 0.3% in the single-modal and multi-modal settings respectively, ranking first across all baselines and a combination of principal component analysis and random forests.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13646
Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation (OV-SGG) requires models to recognize visual relationships beyond the training vocabulary, yet existing methods often rely on dataset-specific object--predicate co-occurrence patterns. Under long-tailed distributions and noisy object localization, such reliance leads to biased, entangled relation representations, limiting both rare-relation recognition and generalization to unseen predicates. To address these challenges, we propose RaRe, a reasoning-aware relational representation learning framework that transforms MLLM-generated chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales into structured relation embeddings. Rather than using CoT only as an intermediate reasoning trace for final prediction, RaRe directly optimizes the rationale-derived representation space to improve inter-relation discriminability. Specifically, RaRe first aligns rationale embeddings with textualized relation descriptions through self-supervised contrastive learning, and then refines rationale generation with a specificity-oriented reinforcement learning objective that encourages semantically object-pair-specific relational evidence. Experiments on VG150 and PSG demonstrate improved category-balanced recognition over existing baselines, while the additional gains from learning vary across datasets and proposal settings. Code available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13496
In the absence of extrinsic rewards or task supervision, human behavior is guided by intrinsic motivation---neural signals that drive curiosity, creativity, play, and other essential facets of intelligence. Intrinsic motivation plays an important developmental role in building robust world models that enable generalization and adaptation. Yet existing studies leave open how a broad range of intrinsic motivations interacts with world-model representation learning to support downstream control. This limits our understanding of which intrinsically collected experiences build reusable models. To address these gaps, we integrate 24 intrinsic objectives, including established methods and explicit variants spanning curiosity, entropy, and competency, into a common model-based reinforcement learning framework. We evaluate the world models they build through zero-shot, few-shot, and multi-task control in locomotion, manipulation, and open-ended gaming environments, using three representation-learning strategies: observation reconstruction, latent prediction, and redundancy reduction. Curiosity-driven exploration with observation reconstruction yields the strongest aggregate family profile, although the best individual pairing depends on the experiment. In compositional vision-based tasks, intrinsic motivation derived from both episodic and lifelong novelty---providing a complementary memory to the world model's generic recurrent state---achieves the best zero-shot transfer and few-shot adaptation. These findings motivate designing intrinsic motivation and representation learning jointly. Our results demonstrate world models as a powerful tool for measuring the quality of intrinsically motivated experience, and positions intrinsic motivation as a key ingredient for building world models autonomously.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13113
Zeolites are an important class of porous crystalline materials with broad applications in gas storage, separations, and catalysis. Although hundreds of thousands of experimentally realized and hypothetical zeolite structures are known, identifying materials optimized for a target application remains challenging because property labels are expensive to obtain and available only for limited structure-molecule pairs. While prior work has demonstrated that 3D neural representations can predict zeolite properties effectively, it remains unclear which representation-learning strategies are most effective in the low-data regime relevant to materials discovery. We present ZeoBench, a benchmark for self-supervised learning on dense 3D representations of all-silica zeolites, and evaluate the resulting features on six existing downstream adsorption-property prediction tasks, across a range of training set sizes. Our study compares self-supervised 3D pretraining on volumetric zeolite data, adaptations of image-pretrained 2D ConvNets and vision transformers to 3D via multiview and channel-inflation strategies, and 3D ConvNets pretrained on out-of-domain volumetric datasets, alongside hand-crafted descriptors and supervised baselines. Using our pretraining and evaluation framework, we find self-supervised 3D representations outperform existing methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance across both in-domain label regimes and for the unseen domain of metal organic frameworks. Learned representations consistently outperform hand-crafted descriptors, and convolutional architectures are generally more effective than vision transformers in this setting. These results establish ZeoBench as a practical benchmark for 3D representation learning in zeolites and provide guidance for data-limited adsorption property prediction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09880
Visible-light videos and multivariate diagnostic signals provide complementary observations of tokamak discharges. However, existing fusion pretraining methods, primarily learn representations by reconstructing or predicting observations, leaving the correspondence between these modalities underexplored. Representation learning is further challenged by the fact that plasma-related regions occupy only part of each video frame and diagnostic variables have substantially different sampling rates. We propose FusionCLIP, a multimodal contrastive pretraining framework. Spatiotemporal Stability Selection retains informative visual tokens, while a Temporal Query Encoder integrates asynchronous diagnostic signals using their observation timestamps. Contrastive learning then aligns the two modality representations. We construct EAST Multimodal Diagnostics (EAST-MMD), comprising 1307 EAST discharges, and evaluate the model on three independently fine-tuned tasks: disruption prediction, edge-localized mode (ELM) classification, and $H_{98}$ regression. FusionCLIP achieves an aggregate score of 89.07\%, exceeding the best general-purpose pretraining configuration and an in-domain contrastive pretraining configuration without Spatiotemporal Stability Selection by 6.27 and 2.12 percentage points, respectively. Ablations and attention visualizations further support the contributions of its key components.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09493
Recently, world-action models (WAMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for robot manipulation. By jointly modeling action generation and future observation prediction, WAMs can act and anticipate the outcomes of the actions. However, existing WAMs typically rely on frozen pretrained encoders trained with reconstruction, which may not produce representations well suited for robot control. In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning physicallygrounded, control-relevant representations for WAMs. We propose MDF++, a visuo-tactile world-action model that learns latent representations of multisensory observations end-to-end with a diffusion backbone. While naive joint training can lead to feature collapse, MDF++ introduces a multi-task learning strategy that leverages cross-modal correlations to learn task-relevant representations. We evaluate MDF++ on a suite of contact-rich manipulation tasks, including realworld bolt screwing and nut mating, and show that it outperforms WAMs built on frozen pretrained representations by up to 50%. Additional videos are available on our website: this http URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09293
Automated fish feeding intensity assessment (FFIA) is important for precision aquaculture and feed cost optimization. However, unimodal methods are vulnerable to acoustic noise and visual disturbances, while existing multimodal frameworks often rely on computationally intensive 3D convolutions or Transformers, limiting their use on edge devices. To address these limitations, we propose HMMF-Net, a lightweight multimodal architecture that combines early multi-frame visual encoding and multi-axis acoustic modeling through a hierarchical bidirectional messenger cross-modal fusion (BMCF) mechanism. The visual branch captures temporal variations in feeding behavior by stacking temporally distant frames as a multi-channel input to an adapted 2D EfficientNetB0 backbone. The acoustic branch employs adaptive multi-axis residual units (AMARU) to extract temporal, frequency, and local time-frequency representations from log-mel spectrograms. BMCF progressively exchanges information between the two modalities at intermediate representation levels through compact messenger tokens, reducing the computational overhead of dense cross-modal attention. Evaluated on the AV-FFIA dataset using five-fold cross-validation, HMMF-Net achieves 96.77% accuracy and 96.88% F1-score on the held-out test folds, with 3.987M parameters and 1.002 GFLOPs. Compared with the best-performing visual configuration (95.49% accuracy), HMMF-Net reduces the classification error by 28.38%. Deployment on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano using TensorRT with FP32 precision maintains comparable accuracy, with an inference time of 11.54 ms per 2-second sample and a model size of 18.81 MB. These results demonstrate that HMMF-Net combines effective multimodal representation learning with computational efficiency, enabling accurate and practical FFIA on resource-constrained edge platforms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09224
Multi-modal fusion algorithms combining conventional frame-based cameras and event cameras have recently attracted substantial research attention. Typically, existing approaches convert event streams into frames, voxels, or tensors, and then learn the required spatiotemporal information from these transformed event representations for fusion with conventional frame-camera data. Obviously, such paradigms only exploit the limited representational capacity of event data. Moreover, standard training pipelines fail to fully leverage diverse model parameters obtained throughout the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel mutual distillation method leveraging multi-view teacher network weights to better integrate multiple event representations and achieve model-parameter level fusion. Specifically, we employ multiple encoders to extract different types of event representations and perform mutual knowledge distillation at both the feature-level and logit-level in this process. Afterwards, we perform a dynamic hierarchical model merge strategy on the model parameters from the first stage to yield a unified multi-modal RGB-Event representation model. Experimental results across multiple event-based datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00107
A joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) that applies prediction supervision only at masked positions struggles to clearly capture object shapes and boundaries in its latent representations. We further observe that some existing methods improve spatial structure while also retaining rich variations in texture and color. However, preserving more low-level visual information does not necessarily make representations better suited to prediction and action. This raises a key question: how can we strengthen the spatial structure in latent representations that supports prediction and action without over-encoding these details? We introduce LEF-JEPA, which learns spatial structure through target-guided latent recovery and transfers this supervision to the visual encoder through a relative-energy constraint; the energy module is used only during pretraining and adds no inference overhead. To reduce the cost of energy optimization during pretraining, we further construct a conditional Ising Hamiltonian that allows low-energy-state search to be performed by specialized Ising solvers. On physical hardware, we validate the feasibility of achieving lower forward latency with fewer local updates. Under a unified CIFAR-10 pretraining and frozen-encoder evaluation protocol, both realizations outperform V-JEPA2.1 in image classification, foreground segmentation, and visual planning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08989
Recent neural decoding approaches achieve strong performance by training on large collections of paired neural-behavioral recordings, but such datasets are expensive, invasive, and difficult to scale. In contrast, behavioral data is abundant and easy to collect, raising the question of whether neural decoding can benefit from decoupling behavioral and neural representation learning. We introduce BEEMO, a flexible multi-session framework that enables training with arbitrary mixtures of paired neural-behavioral recordings and unpaired behavioral data. A behavior decoder learns movement dynamics directly from behavioral trajectories, while neural activity is incorporated through cross-attention layers when available, allowing behavioral and neural supervision to scale independently. Across multiple intracortical motor datasets and tasks in nonhuman primates, we show that incorporating unpaired behavioral data improves decoding performance, particularly when transferring to new tasks, and that adding even a small amount of behavioral data from the target task further improves transfer. By decoupling neural and behavioral data, we unlock a new dimension for scaling: unpaired behavioral data, which is substantially cheaper and easier to collect than paired neural recordings, can be used directly to improve decoding performance. We further show that behavior-only pretraining, without any neural pretraining, achieves performance comparable to models pretrained on substantially larger neural datasets. Together, our results suggest that scaling behavioral data offers a practical and cost-effective path toward neural decoding models that generalize across subjects and tasks. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08263
Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) are reshaping remote sensing by shifting the field from task-specific modeling toward general-purpose geospatial intelligence. Mapping the damage to buildings stands to benefit substantially from this shift, as GFMs pretrained on large-scale Earth observation data provide generalizable geospatial representations that can facilitate effective responses to sudden-onset disasters. Although parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) facilitates GFM adaptation, parameter efficiency does not necessarily translate into label efficiency. Building damage mapping remains challenging due to scarce pre-existing labeled data or limited time for annotation. When weak supervision is introduced to alleviate the labeling bottleneck, we identify the difficulty of learning sufficiently discriminative representations as a key challenge for label-efficient GFM adaptation. To address this challenge, we propose a Positive-Unlabeled GFM Adaptation (PUMA) framework that requires annotations for only a small number of damaged buildings. More specifically, PUMA integrates non-contrastive weakly supervised representation refinement to mitigate the impact of noisy supervision on representation learning from a gradient perspective, and latent-state-based label disambiguation to enable reversible supervision refinement without requiring class prior estimation. Extensive experiments on disaster benchmark datasets from around the world demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of PUMA. A real-world application to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires further highlighted its potential to accurately map damage under highly limited supervision. More broadly, these findings suggest that weakly supervised PEFT offers a label-efficient pathway from GFMs to real-world applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08561
Vision foundation models are the backbone of modern surgical image analysis, yet most surgical systems still rely on encoders pretrained on natural images or on specialist models trained from scratch on comparatively small datasets. Pretraining encoders on large amounts of surgery-specific data has the potential to generally enhance the performance of surgical image analysis methods simply by providing stronger backbones. Here we present InnerLogic-Surg, an open family of surgical vision encoders (21M--300M parameters) obtained by continually pretraining a transformer-based image encoder on millions of surgical images curated from 11,965 internet-sourced surgical videos spanning ~2,900 hours and more than fifteen procedure types. Our training recipe inherits DINOv3's pretraining stage to preserve representation ability after surgical adaptation, and additionally applies a learned feature-upsampling module for high-resolution dense prediction at low token cost. Across a benchmark covering workflow, instrument and anatomy recognition, segmentation, detection, and monocular depth, under the same architecture, the largest InnerLogic-Surg model achieves the best linear-probe performance in all 20 surgical tasks. We demonstrate that surgical continual pretraining yields transferable representations that generalize across procedures, anatomical regions, and task types, showing our surgical image encoders as a promising and scalable alternative to the procedure-specific representation learning approaches that have traditionally dominated surgical computer vision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07883