Self-supervised learning has given rise to vision foundation models that learn general-purpose image representations transferable across downstream tasks, yet representation learning for 3D scenes has not achieved comparable success. Motivated by this, we identify key limitations of current 3D representation learning approaches and revisit their core design choices. We first replace the commonly used hierarchical PTv3 backbone with the Volume Transformer, a ViT-like architecture for 3D scenes. We then redesign two core objectives of modern approaches built around student-teacher networks: matching representations across views and predicting masked content from visible context. For the first objective, we separate the roles of teacher and student: the teacher provides clean, consistent targets while the student learns invariance to stronger perturbations. For the second objective, we prevent the student from accessing the masked geometry and instead require it to infer missing representations from visible context only. Finally, we redesign 2D-to-3D knowledge distillation, replacing direct regression of view-dependent image features with view-consistent supervision. Together, these changes form VINO, a framework that learns semantic representations of 3D scenes without labels. VINO substantially improves dense linear probing across indoor and outdoor benchmarks and transfers strongly to out-of-domain settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07176
Message-passing graph neural networks (GNNs) are limited in expressive power by the one-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman test. Persistent homology (PH) provides topological descriptors that can complement GNN representations, but existing approaches typically compute persistence separately from the representation learning process. In this paper, we introduce Message-Passing Graph Persistence (MGP), a family of topological descriptors that incorporates message passing into graph filtrations. At each filtration step, node embeddings are updated using the current subgraph and associated with persistence events. These embeddings also determine the representatives of connected components during persistence computation. We prove that MGP is invariant under graph isomorphism and that it is strictly more expressive than the PH-based descriptors it extends. We evaluate MGP on an expressivity benchmark and on several graph classification and regression datasets. Experiments show that MGP outperforms other PH-based descriptors on most of these datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06801
Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting perspectives. A system-level architecture, comparative tables and five case analyses connect design choices across these layers. We distinguish within-study experimental comparisons from heterogeneous corpus statistics, vendor specifications and company-reported results. Three conclusions emerge. First, the value of human data depends on kinematic, visual and contact alignment, not recording volume alone. Second, shared action representations and foundation policies do not remove embodiment-specific constraints on force, latency and contact. Third, task completion is insufficient to establish physical correctness or deployment readiness. Evidence remains limited for zero-shot transfer of contact-rich skills between morphologically different hands, long-duration reliability, and cross-sensor tactile generalization. We identify eleven open problems and propose reporting interfaces and controlled comparisons that can make full-stack progress more measurable. The review is a structured narrative synthesis rather than a pooled performance ranking or an exhaustive systematic review.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06724
Deep learning methods for pathology are constrained by the limited availability and high cost of large-scale pixel-level annotations. Synthetic data can alleviate this limitation, but existing pipelines often lack reliable quality control and remain weakly connected to downstream analysis. To address these issues, we propose a three-stage framework that integrates automated data screening, generative representation learning, and efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. First, we develop a pathology agent system to assess image quality and filter samples, resulting in TCGA-200K, a dataset containing 217,030 pathology patches selected from the public TCGA repository. Second, we train a generative model on the screened data. In addition to image synthesis, its backbone learns structural and semantic representations that can be transferred to downstream tasks. Third, we adapt the pretrained generative backbone to semantic segmentation using a lightweight task-specific head. We further introduce PathSeg-380K, a semantic segmentation dataset with expert annotations for approximately 380,000 cells across 12 cell types. Experiments on multiple pathology datasets show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance. Our code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06701
Cross-modal retrieval (CMR) aims to bridge the semantic gaps between modalities by learning shared representations. Unfortunately, due to the dynamism and inconsistencies in real-world data acquisition, multimodal datasets frequently encounter severe modality incompleteness. Existing incomplete CMR methods adhere to a label-driven paradigm, relying heavily on categorical annotations as the semantic benchmark. However, label noise is difficult to avoid and often coexists with modality incompleteness. To address this challenge, we propose a novel semantic prior-guided framework for incomplete cross-modal retrieval with noisy labels, termed SPIRN. Specifically, SPIRN uses fixed semantic priors as a consistent reference for robust representation learning, noisy-label handling, and missing-modality completion. Based on this reference, Semantic Priors Guidance (SPG) establishes a stable category-level semantic space, Quality-aware Robust Learning (QRL) dynamically evaluates sample quality to distinguish clean samples from noisy ones and handles noise via reverse learning, Prior-guided Global Label Calibration (PGLC) rectifies corrupted annotations for refined supervision, and Confidence-driven Selective Imputation (CSI) recovers missing modalities from a cross-modal memory bank while filtering unreliable imputations with an increasing threshold. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework to jointly tackle the dual challenges of modality incompleteness and label noise in the CMR community. Extensive experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPIRN outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods in various scenarios involving both missing modalities and noisy labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06113
Generative spoken language models (SLMs) offer a route to learning linguistic structure purely from speech, yet they lag far behind text-based models in both capability and data scaling efficiency. We identify two bottlenecks underlying this gap: the limited linguistic quality of existing speech units and the reliance on a single stream of discrete units to represent speech. Multiple codebooks are widely used to encode acoustic features but rarely to represent speech semantics. We present GSLM2, which learns and models complementary properties of speech at multiple levels of abstraction. Its encoder, SpidR 2.0, uses self-supervised learning with differentiable prediction heads to induce high-quality discrete units at multiple levels. A multi-stream SLM then jointly models these units using a shared temporal backbone, stream-specific predictors, and an autoregressive head that captures cross-stream dependencies. Across training data sizes and model scales, up to 6M hours and 6.5B parameters, GSLM2 consistently improves linguistic competence while scaling more efficiently with data. As a result, it substantially narrows the gap between spoken and text-based LMs; across read and conversational speech domains, we shrink the gap by about two orders of magnitude on sWuggy, sBLIMP, and tSC, while also outperforming competitive speech-text systems on all three tasks. We open-source the training code and model checkpoints at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01143
Understanding the structure of complex, nonstationary, high-dimensional time-evolving signals is a central challenge in scientific data analysis. In many domains, such as speech and biomedical signal processing, the ability to learn disentangled and interpretable representations is critical for uncovering latent generative mechanisms. Traditional approaches to unsupervised representation learning, including variational autoencoders (VAEs), often struggle to capture the temporal and spectral diversity inherent in such data. Here we introduce variational decomposition autoencoding (VDA), a framework that incorporates a strong structural bias toward signal decomposition into variational representation learning. VDA is instantiated through variational decomposition autoencoders (DecVAEs), i.e., encoder-only neural networks that perform latent autoencoding at the level of distributions to learn multiple latent subspaces aligned with time-frequency characteristics. We evaluate DecVAEs on simulated data and three publicly available scientific datasets, spanning speech recognition, dysarthric speech evaluation, and emotional speech classification. DecVAEs improve on VAE-based methods in disentanglement quality and robustness, and their latent subspaces become factor-specific when the generative factors have distinct spectral signatures. These findings position decomposition-aware architectures as potential tools for extracting structured representations from speech, and potentially from other dynamic signals with factors exhibiting distinct spectral signatures, with applications in clinical diagnostics, human-computer interaction, and adaptive neurotechnologies.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06844
Large Language Models (LLMs) can turn natural-language optimization tasks into solver-checked answers, but current agents remain brittle under narrative rewrites and often store reusable experience at the instance level. We introduce \textsc{ArchOR}, an archetype-centric skill agent that builds on \textsc{OptSkills} by adding two retrieval-focused modules. \emph{Centroid-Aware Representation Learning} (CARL) refines the ordering of cached skill representations through a low-rank prototype residual. \emph{Signature-Guided Retrieval} (S\textsuperscript{3}R) attaches open-dimensional structural signatures to skills, prioritizes candidates by weighted Jaccard overlap, and bounds semantic re-ranking to a top-$K$ set. A baseline-preserving arbitration rule determines when the structural route should replace the original selector. With the same DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash backbone and released skill library, \textsc{ArchOR} reaches 65.00\% Micro-Avg.\ Pass@1 across five benchmarks, improving over \textsc{OptSkills} by 1.64~pp Micro-Avg.\ and 2.68~pp Macro-Avg.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41909
Taxonomy construction is essential for knowledge-intensive NLP yet remains costly: clustering-based methods (i) need careful per-corpus tuning and yield unstable hierarchies, while LLM-based pipelines (ii) depend on expensive task-specific training that does not transfer across domains. We report an empirical finding that bears on both: in Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) embeddings, where each leading prefix is itself a usable, coarser vector, prefix length aligns with the coarse-to-fine granularity of gold taxonomies; shuffled- and reverse-dimension controls isolate the alignment to the learned early prefix dimensions. The pattern holds across three architecturally distinct MRL models. To test whether this regularity is usable, we introduce PEEL (Peeling Embeddings to Extract Latent ontologies): a minimal probe over these frozen embeddings, trained once with an order-embedding objective that represents hierarchy as vector containment; a minimum spanning arborescence then decodes taxonomic DAGs. Using only a concept vocabulary (no documents), PEEL recovers taxonomic DAGs with high structural fidelity on two OLLM benchmarks, transferring to a new domain with no target-edge supervision. The end-to-end OLLM pipeline, which jointly discovers concepts and induces structure from document corpora, is reported as a cross-task reference. Pre-trained retrieval embeddings encode a decodable granularity gradient; a minimal probe renders it as explicit parent-child (is-a) structure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41785
Digital medicine now captures data that traces individual health trajectories and reveals population health dynamics through electronic health records, claims, remote monitoring, wearable devices, mobile devices, social sensing data, medical images, etc. But much of its modeling still centers on task-specific, outcome-specific, and prediction-specific estimation. The next frontier is not simply better prediction, but action in an evolving health world shaped by multiple decision-makers, heterogeneous populations, resource constraints, and feedback in care delivery. This is why digital medicine now needs world models: not only to estimate what will happen, but to represent how actions change what can happen next -- whom to prioritize, how to allocate scarce resources, how to adapt care across subgroups, and how interventions reshape future health trajectories and population dynamics. We call such a model population health world model (PHWM): a more foundational representation of an evolving health world in which health states, individual trajectories, population health dynamics, interventions, constraints, and feedback are intrinsically coupled. Building a PHWM endows three unmet structural gaps in current digital medicine: dynamic health-state modeling, population-level intervention intelligence, and validation, equity, and governance for action-oriented use. We argue that addressing these gaps requires three minimal capabilities: representation learning under action-dependent observation, multi-scale intervention intelligence, and validation with explicit decision boundaries, while highlighting the importance of social, contextual, and public-health sensing data for action-oriented digital medicine.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.24662
Computer vision models learn hand action only from its visual consequences, without access to the underlying embodied motor signals. We address this absence with MotorSense, the first large-scale paired egocentric video and surface electromyography (EMG) dataset. MotorSense pairs bimanual EMG bands with egocentric video and yields synchronized video, bimanual EMG and IMU, and audio across 100 hours of unscripted manipulation. EMG offers a powerful scalable alternative to manual annotation: it captures finger movement, hand configuration, and the forces exerted between hand and environment as a dense signal free of occlusion and labeler bias, whereas manual annotation is costly, subjective, and unreliable under occlusion. We use MotorSense to learn sensorimotor alignment, producing an organization of action that is shared across the visual and motoric spaces, through cross-modal pre-training between video and EMG. The resultant vision models are then transferred to downstream tasks that benefit from sensorimotor alignment: in this case, action recognition, 3D hand reconstruction, and 3D contact reconstruction. We further demonstrate a generative application in which EMG motor signals are used to condition a video diffusion model, yielding videos of fine-grained hand manipulation. Across four action-centric computer vision tasks and eight popular video datasets, we demonstrate that sensorimotor alignment provides a stronger foundation for visual representation learning than conventional self-supervised learning methods over video, outperforming every baseline across all tasks and datasets evaluated.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41127
Holistic co-speech motion generation aims to synthesize coordinated facial expressions, hand gestures, and body movements from speech, which is challenging due to heterogeneous part-specific dynamics, long-range temporal coherence, and cross-part coordination. Directly modeling high-dimensional motion can be unstable, while overly compact or unstructured latent spaces may lose fine-grained motion details. We present \textbf{TalkFlow}, a structured latent flow framework for speech-driven holistic motion generation. TalkFlow learns a continuous three-stream latent representation for upper-body motion, lower-body motion, and facial expressions, preserving part-specific dynamics without forcing heterogeneous motion components into a single latent space. To maintain holistic coordination, lightweight cross-stream interactions are incorporated in both latent representation learning and flow-based generation. Conditioned on multi-level speech features, TalkFlow performs speech-conditioned latent flow matching, learning a continuous transport process from source latents to realistic motion latents. Experiments on the BEAT2 dataset demonstrate strong performance across facial expression accuracy, body gesture quality, and speech-motion synchronization. Qualitative comparisons and user studies further show that TalkFlow generates more natural, expressive, and speech-aligned holistic motion than state-of-the-art methods. The project page is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40972
Recent progress in deep learning has substantially advanced automated grading of ophthalmologic pathologies, supported by large annotated datasets and improved representation learning. However, a significant gap remains between state-of-the-art performance and clinical scalability. In particular, foundation models have reshaped image-based medical screening and diagnosis. These large-scale architectures trained on extensive datasets learn rich, generalizable feature representations that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. In ophthalmology, RETFound, one of the most relevant foundation models for retinal images, performs strongly across classification, segmentation, and risk prediction tasks. Despite their effectiveness, foundation models are often computationally prohibitive, hindering their deployment in real-world clinical environments where hardware constraints and latency are critical. To bridge this gap, we introduce CAMEL (Cross-Architecture Masked Embedding Learning), a novel cross-architecture distillation framework that uses an asymmetric masking strategy during embedding learning to effectively transfer knowledge from massive teacher foundation models to compact, lightweight student models. Our experimental evaluation across four datasets shows that CAMEL preserves accuracy while drastically reducing computational complexity, enabling lightweight yet highly accurate models suitable for resource-limited clinical settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40954
The Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (Lasso) has been widely employed for feature selection in linear models and has also been extended to multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks for both feature and group feature selection. Group-Lasso has also been used in feature selection using feed-forward neural networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to incorporate the Group-Lasso principle into a Siamese network architecture for feature selection. Unlike existing approaches that primarily optimize classification accuracy, the proposed method aims to identify a compact subset of features that simultaneously preserves the intrinsic representation of the input data (the goal of Siamese network) and is expected to achieve high classification performance. Two variants of the proposed framework are developed: one based on the Euclidean distance and the other on a modified Jaccard similarity measure for real-valued vectors. The latter is specifically designed to improve feature selection for high?dimensional sparse data. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on 12 benchmark datasets with feature dimensions ranging from 6 to 7070 using eight different classifiers. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Siamese Lasso framework consistently identifies compact and discriminative feature subsets maintaining competitive or superior classification performance, although the loss function used explicitly did not consider any regularizer to learn classification. In addition, the quality of the embeddings produced by these networks is assessed using manifold learning techniques such as UMAP and t-SNE.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39499
Behavior Cloning (BC) of expert controllers for multiscale dynamical systems is challenging: state variables evolving at widely separated timescales induce highly nonlinear couplings that a shared latent space may fail to adequately represent, degrading closed-loop generalization. We propose Structured Representation Learning for Behavior Cloning (SRLBC), an architecture designed to leverage the physical knowledge of multiscale systems in which slow state variables, fast (stiff) state variables, and predictable exogenous inputs evolve at different timescales. On 500 long-horizon roll-outs of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) load-following benchmark -a high-dimensional, stiff industrial system with challenging safety constraints -and across 20 training seeds, separated embeddings systematically outperform shared embedding baselines on cumulative cost, imitation accuracy and constraint satisfaction. The resulting standalone policies approach NMPC closed-loop performance at a computational cost 15 times lower on average. Since standalone policies still leave a few percent of trajectories infeasible, we embed the learned policies in a safety-augmented approximate NMPC framework, in which the optimizer is only called when the predicted input sequence is not certified as safe. This yields controllers still 6.8 times faster than the NMPC controller on average, with a feasibility (i.e., constraint satisfaction) of at least 99.8% for all architectures, SRLBC retaining the lowest closed-loop cost. Under distribution shift, standalone BC policies degrade sharply: SRLBC degrades the least, and once safety-augmented, it retains a feasibility above 98% with the lowest closed-loop cost. Beyond the quantitative results, Jacobian-based sensitivity analysis shows that the resulting controller relies on a sparse and less redundant set of latent features, each attributable to a single group of physical variables, and aligned with the physical timescale decomposition of the system.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38496
As egocentric video becomes increasingly available for embodied learning, an important research question is how to turn this low-cost, scalable source of data into robot manipulation capabilities. Egocentric videos naturally provide rich context for high-level task understanding, while real-robot demonstrations with wrist observations and action annotations provide supervision for fine-grained action alignment. We present Ego-CEVR, a data-native framework for hierarchical visual representation learning that assigns distinct learning objectives to global and interaction representations. The global module learns object relations, task state, and temporal progress through future prediction on egocentric video. The Interaction module interprets wrist observations in global context and learns local alignment and contact cues through robot action supervision. Separate residual paths expose both representations to the action policy, preserving direct access to task context alongside fine-grained execution information. Ego-CEVR supports independent pretraining of its global video module on large-scale human egocentric videos and videos from diverse robot embodiments, without requiring robot action labels or paired wrist observations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37509
Early identification of neurodegenerative disorders using structural T1-weighted MRI is essential for timely clinical intervention, yet supervised deep learning models often struggle to generalize due to limited annotations and scanner-induced distribution shift. Self-supervised learning offers a promising alternative; however, existing approaches are largely adapted from natural image paradigms, relying on contrastive objectives or generic masked reconstruction with voxel-wise losses, which may not fully capture the distributed morphometric patterns associated with neurodegeneration. We introduce SYMBA (SYstematic Morphometric Brain Autoencoding), a self-supervised pretraining framework specifically designed for structural brain MRI. SYMBA integrates anatomically constrained masking, a multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM) reconstruction objective, and a progressive curriculum that transitions from local anatomical detail to global brain morphology. These components explicitly incorporate neuroanatomical structure into the self-supervised objective rather than relying on generic image priors. Pretrained on 6,953 T1-weighted MRI scans from nine heterogeneous cohorts, SYMBA is evaluated using frozen linear probing on two independent unseen datasets, enabling a strict assessment of out-of-distribution generalization. Across multiple clinical tasks, SYMBA consistently outperforms recent neuroimaging foundation models, achieving 0.930 AUROC for Alzheimer's disease classification, 0.772 for mild cognitive impairment conversion prediction, and strong performance in amyloid status prediction. In low-label regimes, SYMBA demonstrates high sample efficiency, reaching approximately 0.90 AUROC for AD/CN classification using only six labeled subjects.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37074
Spine landmark detection from spinal X-ray is a key step for estimating spine deformation severity, for building biomechanical models, and for pre-operative planning. We reframe anatomical landmark detection as a pixel-level contrastive representation learning problem, matching dense pixel embeddings with landmark prototypes. Surprisingly, even with a generic U-Net backbone, this formulation results in more discriminative heatmaps compared to the traditional heatmap regression paradigm, leading to improved discrimination between vertebral corners on distinct vertebra. Furthermore, we combine the resulting heatmaps with learnable shape priors over the global configuration of spinal landmarks to resolve ambiguities in landmark locations, yielding a simple and practical approach to spinal landmark detection. Our approach is competitive, in terms of landmark accuracy and clinical parameter estimation, with the state-of-the-art on the public AASCE dataset and on two private spinal X-ray datasets. Our code and pre-trained weights are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36951
DNA methylation (DNAM) array-based tumor classification is a powerful clinical diagnostic tool, but models trained on fixed reference cohorts can produce faulty predictions for tumor types not represented in the training distribution. We propose an end-to-end deep representation learning-based out-of-distribution (OOD) detection framework for DNAm array data. Deep neural network (DNN) classifiers were trained on public sarcoma (SARC) (GSE140686) and brain tumor (BT) (GSE90496) cohorts, and feature vectors were extracted from bottleneck layers. Five OOD methods, including 1dimension (1D)-Subspace Analysis (1D-SSA), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Ridge Regression, Mahalanobis Distance (MD), and Sum of Squared Distances (SSD), were explored with 200 and 500-dimensional embeddings. Spectral discrepancy was used to discriminate in-distribution (IND) from OOD samples. Performance was measured via cross-validation, holdout samples, and an independent clinical dataset. 1D-SSA was the most effective approach. In the sarcoma-IND/brain tumor-OOD setting, the framework achieved an AUROC of 0.975 and True Negative Rate (TNR)@95TPR of 0.930, and an AUROC of 0.9569 and TNR@95TPR of 0.8660 for the brain tumor-IND/sarcoma-OOD setting. On the independent clinical test set, the method yielded a mean AUROC of 0.976, a DE of 0.032, an FPR@95TPR of 0.065, and a TNR@95TPR of 0.935. These results show deep representation-based OOD detection as a practical quality-control layer for clinical-grade methylation-based tumor classification systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36344
Tensor recovery spans heterogeneous data structures and observation processes, calling for a representation that can adapt across modalities and tasks. We propose DiffTR, an unsupervised framework that unifies tensor completion, denoising, and hyperspectral super-resolution through coordinate-conditioned diffusion. Shared factors indexed by tensor coordinates condition a compact score network, and score matching jointly learns the factors and an implicit tensor representation from the available observations. Scalar and vector-valued outputs accommodate individual entries and entire tubes, enabling a common formulation for tabular tensors, images, and videos. The framework separates representation learning from task-specific observation modeling: reverse diffusion recovers missing values; estimation via Tweedie's formula, soft thresholding, and optional spatial consistency support mixed-noise denoising; and measurement-guided sampling transfers a prior learned from low-resolution hyperspectral observations to high-resolution reconstruction, followed by post-sampling refinement with data consistency and spectral subspace regularization. This separation makes the representation compatible with different corruption models and permits task-specific constraints to be incorporated within the same recovery framework. Experiments across multiple tensor modalities and recovery tasks demonstrate competitive reconstruction quality and the flexibility of a unified conditional generative representation. The code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35368