Chinese dialects discrimination is a challenging natural language processing task due to scarce annotation resource. In this article, we develop a novel Chinese dialects discrimination framework with transfer learning and data augmentation (CDDTLDA) in order to overcome the shortage of resources. To be more specific, we first use a relatively larger Chinese dialects corpus to train a source-side automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Then, we adopt a simple but effective data augmentation method (i.e., speed, pitch, and noise disturbance) to augment the target-side low-resource Chinese dialects, and fine-tune another target ASR model based on the previous source-side ASR model. Meanwhile, the potential common semantic features between source-side and target-side ASR models can be captured by using self-attention mechanism. Finally, we extract the hidden semantic representation in the target ASR model to conduct Chinese dialects discrimination. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark Chinese dialects corpora.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18597
Policy models often assume that the relationship between a policy instrument and its outcome remains stable across institutional conditions. In adaptive socio-technical systems this assumption may fail: regulatory change can alter incentives, agents can respond strategically, and the mapping from policy variables to aggregate outcomes can change. This paper studies such regime change as a transfer-learning problem in adaptive multi-agent systems. A policy regime is represented as a learning problem induced by an observable input distribution and a target function mapping policy variables to outcomes. We compare a blank-slate learner that searches a flexible hypothesis class in the new regime with a transfer learner whose effective hypothesis class is restricted by structural knowledge from the previous regime. Transfer is beneficial when this restriction preserves the new target function while reducing effective complexity; it is harmful when the restriction excludes the new target and creates misspecification. A stylized emissions-regulation experimental environment and a dynamic ABM robustness experiment support the claim. When the target regime preserves an affine monotone tax-emissions relation, transfer improves empirical small-sample performance. When the target regime introduces a threshold break, the same transferred structure produces negative transfer: held-out error remains high, online prediction generates more mistakes, and repeated online streams show larger cumulative and final-window error under misspecification. The contribution is methodological: previous regulatory experience should be reused when it captures stable structural invariants, but treated cautiously when policy change alters the policy-outcome relationship.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.09685
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead. Latent reasoning moves deliberation into continuous space, but existing methods mostly learn deterministic or reward-maximizing paths, lacking a principled way to allocate probability across trajectories with different correctness and costs. We propose Latent Thought Flow (LTF), which models reasoning as variable-length continuous trajectories and trains a sampler to match a reward-induced posterior over answer quality and computation cost. We instantiate this with a continuous GFlowNet using stochastic latent transitions. To handle sparse answer supervision, we introduce an Entropy-Weighted Subtrajectory Balance objective for intermediate rewards and a reference-prior regularizer to anchor exploration. Experiments under finetuning and transfer learning settings show that LTF outperforms explicit CoT and latent reasoning baselines, improving accuracy by 9.5% while reducing reasoning length by 27.2% on average compared with strong latent reasoning baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16222
The underwater images are captured within diverse water-medium conditions, leading to complex degradation, including color bias, low contrast, and blur effect. Recently, learning-based methods have demonstrated their potential for underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, most of the previous work focus on the training strategy or network design to make the enhanced result aligned well with the labels in datasets, ignoring that the labels are selected from the enhanced results of previous UIE methods and these pseudo-labels are noisy. Consequently, the performance of their models is not satisfactory to a certain extent. However, collecting the true labels of the underwater images is challenging. In this work, we propose a transfer learning-based UIE that does not require underwater images to have paired noisy or true labels for learning. Instead, the UIE task is first divided into global color correction, haze removal, and background noise suppression following the underwater physics. Then multiple types of prior from other vision tasks are leveraged as cross-domain supervision in each step. In this way, a novel UIE is available via transfer learning, and the physics-aligned UIE decomposition provides theoretical soundness. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposal based on physics and priors fusion achieves SOTA performance in the UIE task and effectively boosts downstream vision tasks, significantly outperforming benchmark methods. Project repo: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15648
Accurate traffic flow prediction remains challenging in cross-city, data-scarce scenarios where limited historical data hinders model generalisation. The chaotic nature of traffic dynamics, complex spatio-temporal dependencies, and heterogeneous urban networks complicate few-shot learning across cities. Existing deep learning approaches either treat traffic as purely deterministic or lack mechanisms to model wave-like interference patterns essential for cross-regime traffic dynamics. To address these limitations, this paper proposes CIWI-CKT, a novel Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion framework with Cross-City Knowledge Transfer. Our framework introduces three core innovations: chaos-informed wave generation that extracts measurable chaos invariants and models traffic as adaptive wave components; meta-interference processing that captures wave interactions between support and query regimes while producing a predictability score for confidence estimation; and chaos-aware meta-learning that enables efficient cross-city knowledge transfer while preserving chaotic characteristics. We establish theoretical guarantees including chaos-to-wave stability, wave-induced dimension reduction, and meta-learning generalisation bounds. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that CIWI-CKT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art spatio-temporal graph learning, transfer learning, prompt-based, and few-shot methods, improving prediction accuracy while substantially reducing required training data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15642
Fine-tuning Transformer-based foundation models has become the dominant strategy for domain adaptation in audio and speech processing. To reduce the computational and memory costs of this process, parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods have been widely explored. Meanwhile, Mamba, a recent state-space model, has emerged as a promising alternative to Transformers for sequence modeling. In this work, we present MambAdapter, a parameter-efficient transfer learning approach that integrates Mamba into low-rank bottleneck adapters. Our design combines parameter sharing across adapters with the injection of a lightweight Mamba module, enabling more effective modeling of audio features. We demonstrate that MambAdapter matches or outperforms strong PETL baselines on four audio classification tasks and five speech recognition languages, even when operating under reduced parameter budgets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15638
In this paper, we introduce DenseControl, a novel pipeline for generating dense crowd images. Specifically, DenseControl meticulously positions and sizes each generated instance to align precisely with the predefined coordinates and scales. Based on this, we further allow for control over the background, style, and attributes of instances. The motivation behind DenseControl stems from the observation of two main challenges in synthesizing crowd images: controlling signal embedding and maintaining topological integrity when imparting instance scale guidance. To address these, we first introduce the Isolated Object Embedding (IOE) map, a novel representation that facilitates spatial location control while mitigating the difficulties associated with learning projections for model. Secondly, we propose an Implicit Scale Embedding (ISE) strategy that seamlessly integrates with the IOE map to encode precise scale information. To further enhance the efficacy of combining ISE with the IOE map, we incorporate a Position Shortcut mechanism that enhances cross-attention to alleviate projection challenges. We evaluate DenseControl through two lenses: synthesis quality and applicability in latent applications. Experiments across different control conditions demonstrate DenseControl achieves state-of-the-art results in dense crowd image synthesis. Furthermore, we showcase applications in augmenting crowd analysis under data scarcity, transfer learning, and weather generalization scenes, to highlight the practical utility of DenseControl. The codebase will be released.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15592
Electronic prior authorization workflows require FHIR Questionnaire items to carry LOINC codes, yet most items in the HL7 Da Vinci CDS-Library lack these bindings. We treat this as a retrieval problem: given a Questionnaire item's text, find the correct LOINC code in a pool of 97,314 active codes. We compare six methods (TF-IDF, frozen MiniLM, BioBERT, BioLORD, contrastively fine-tuned MiniLM, and a TF-IDF+GPT reranker) on a 54-item evaluation set spanning three query styles (natural question, medium, and terse). No single method wins on every metric. BioLORD, a frozen encoder pre-trained on biomedical ontology definitions, has the best top-rank accuracy (R@1 = 0.185, MRR = 0.246) despite seeing no task-specific data, while a contrastive fine-tune on raw LHC-Forms pairs takes R@5 (0.389) and R@10 (0.426). A distribution-shift ablation shows why the fine-tune in our main table is not the strongest one: adding GPT-generated paraphrases to the raw pairs drops R@5 from 0.389 to 0.296, so the augmented union underperforms raw-only training on every metric except R@1. Performance peaks at 5k training pairs. Error analysis on BioLORD's R@1 failures shows that wrong-specificity and ambiguous-text cases together account for 59% of errors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15449
Deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art image classification but face deployment challenges due to computational costs and energy demands. We propose a lightweight training strategy that adapts normalization layers of the model to the new domain and decouples feature extraction from classifier optimization, reducing overhead by precomputing features only once. A redesigned classifier head with margin-based weighted loss further minimizes ambiguity without end-to-end backpropagation. Evaluated across four CNN architectures (ResNet18, ResNet50, MobileNet, DenseNet121), three Transformer models (ViT, Swin and DeiT) and three medical datasets (Brain Cancer MRI, BreakHis and PatchCamelyon), our approach significantly reduces the required training time with only a marginal accuracy trade-off, often matching or surpassing baseline performance. This efficiency translates to reducing CO2 by orders of magnitude, offering a practical and environmentally sustainable solution for resource-constrained clinical or prototyping environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13043
Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15000
Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17504
Wave parameters in the nearshore are crucial for coastal engineering, shoreline protection, marine hazard assessment, and coastal management for climate resilience. Traditional monitoring systems like buoys and radar platforms offer accurate monitoring but can have high installation and maintenance expenses and limited spatial coverage. Passive ocean monitoring using video has been achieved by leveraging deep learning, however, many methods are not physically interpretable, feasible, and validated for oceanography. In thiswork, a Physics-Guided Deep Spatiotemporal Learning Framework for direct estimation of nearshore wave peak periods from passive coastal video stream is proposed. The framework combines automated temporal-variance based region-of-interest detection, multi-stage Sim-to-Real transfer learning, and physics-informed regularization to enhance the predictive accuracy and physical consistency. A variety of spatiotemporal architectures were assessed, such as transformer-based and recurrent-convolutional ones, alongside synthetic pretraining,silver-label adaptation, and expert fine-tuning. The results show that transformer-based architectures outperformed in terms of the accuracy of the instantaneous prediction, while lightweight recurrent-convolutional architectures achieved higher temporal stability and operational oceanographic skill. Ablation studies also demonstrated the benefits of physics-guided regularization in terms of trend-following consistency, and physically implausible predictions. Explainability auditing also helped to focus attention in hydrodynamically active surf-zone regions and showed good agreement with the physically derived wave propagation behavior. In general, the proposed framework shows the promise of physics-guided video-based deep learning systems for long-term coastal wave monitoring that are cost-efficient and operationally feasible.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13302
Predicting time-to-event outcomes such as mortality is a fundamental task in clinical decision-making, commonly addressed through survival analysis. While classical statistical and deep learning approaches have been widely studied, they typically require task-specific training and sufficient labeled data. Recent advances in tabular foundation models offer a new paradigm by learning general-purpose representations for structured data. However, their applicability to censored time-to-event prediction in clinical settings remains underexplored, as typical applications are restricted to discrete classification rather than survival analysis tasks. In this work, we propose a lightweight adaptation approach for applying tabular foundation models to clinical survival analysis by directly training a survival-aware head on top of the pretrained representations. We study representative architectures, including TabPFN, TabDPT, and TabICL, and adapt them using a multi-task logistic regression (MTLR) head to model right-censored time-to-event outcomes. We evaluate this approach on a diverse set of public survival benchmarks and two large-scale ICU cohorts, MIMIC-IV and eICU. Our results show that this transfer learning approach achieves competitive or superior performance compared to strong baselines. On MIMIC-IV, TabDPT-FT-MTLR reaches a C-index of 0.856, corresponding to a relative improvement of +1.4% over the best non-FM baseline (DeepSurv, 0.844) and +6.7% over the best zero-shot model (0.802). On eICU, TabICL-FT-MTLR achieves 0.797, yielding gains of +1.7% (DeepSurv, 0.784) and +6.4% (0.749), respectively. These findings highlight the importance of combining pretrained tabular representations with survival-aware objectives and suggest that tabular foundation models provide a practical and effective alternative for clinical survival prediction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12006
Precision agriculture requires the estimation of plant growth stages in real-time. When the plant growth stage is known, the wastage of resources in cultivation, such as nutrients and water, is reduced as only the required resources need to be supplied. Plants at different growth stages, however, have similar morphological features, which can make autonomous growth stage estimation difficult. This paper presents two feature extraction methods for growth stage estimation: one that uses a bank of Gabor filters and morphological operations, and the other that uses pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transfer learning. We test these methods on a publicly available plant growth stage dataset (``bccr-segset``) for two species, canola and radish, grown and captured under indoor conditions. The two proposed feature extraction methods are compared, using support vector machines and boosted trees as classifiers. We find that both methods are suitable for real-time applications, and that CNN features outperform the hand-crafted features, both with regard to speed and accuracy. The best system (VGG-19 features, classified with a radial basis function support vector machine) obtained an accuracy of 98.4% for both species, processing an image in 0.08 seconds.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11966
The need for detecting and sorting batteries is drastically increasing for many applications. This study proves the potential of transfer learning in predicting whether the image contains a battery or not, the location and identifying three types of batteries, namely: prismatic, pouch, and cylindrical Lithium-Ion Batteries (LIB). Particularly, it focuses on the transfer learning method in two applications: Training a large-scale dataset to detect electronic devices using a pre-trained YOLOv5m, then using these latter trained weights to detect and classify the batteries. The precision of battery detection achieves 94%, which outperforms the pretrained YOLOv5m weights with 5%, in 22 ms inference time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11779
Transfer learning from large-scale RGB foundation models to infrared (IR) imagery through knowledge distillation (KD) remains challenging due to fundamental differences in image formation physics. We investigate the spectral structure of the RGB--IR modality gap and observe that feature divergence is not uniform across spatial frequencies: low-frequency components (shape, layout) show greater cross-modal alignment than high-frequency components (texture, fine edges), which reflect modality-specific characteristics. Based on this analysis, we propose FreqKD, a frequency-decoupled distillation framework that applies asymmetric supervision adapted to each band's cross-modal consistency. The method employs strict mean squared error (MSE) on the low-frequency band to preserve shared structural information and a relaxed log-MSE loss (weighted at 0.1) on the high-frequency band to provide edge guidance while tolerating texture differences. Spectral divergence analysis on 500 paired samples shows that high-frequency divergence exceeds low-frequency divergence by a factor of 2.4x on average across all analysed transformer layers. On KAIST multispectral pedestrian detection, FreqKD achieves 64.1 mAP50, improving 2.4 points over the DINOv2 baseline. The learned representation transfers across datasets (FLIR ADAS, +2.1 mAP50), tasks (MFNet segmentation, +1.85 mean intersection-over-union), and architectures (ResNet-50, +1.0 mAP50). Code is available at: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11572
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are stealthy, multi-stage cyberattacks whose detection is difficult due to scarce labeled traces, severe class imbalance, and the challenge of generating realistic malicious behavior. These challenges are amplified in cross-operating-system (cross-OS) settings, where a detector trained on one source platform must be deployed on an unlabeled target platform without access to target-domain labels. We study this source-only cross-OS APT detection problem using system-level provenance traces and propose a transport-based framework for ranking anomalous target processes under zero target supervision. The framework abstracts process behavior into structured natural-language descriptions, embeds them using pretrained language models, and constructs a source-normal reference for target scoring. It combines three evidence channels: semantic deviation from source-normal prototypes, structural deviation captured by graph autoencoding, and geometric deviation measured through Optimal Transport (OT). The main contribution is an OT-based barycentric anomaly score that projects target embeddings onto the source-normal manifold and quantifies residual transport mismatch. We further introduce entropy-weighted, angle-aware, and density-aware OT variants to capture uncertainty, directional drift, and sparse-support behavior. Evaluation on DARPA Transparent Computing data spanning Linux, Windows, BSD, and Android, across two APT scenarios and twelve cross-OS transfer pairs, shows that the proposed framework improves ROC-AUC and nDCG over source-only anomaly-detection baselines. The results demonstrate that source-only provenance modeling, combined with semantic abstraction and OT-based anomaly scoring, can support practical cross-platform APT detection without target-domain supervision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10216
Individual animal recognition can be useful in the search for lost or stolen pets, the tracking of individuals of endangered species, and the recognition of animals in crowded farms. Present recognition techniques mostly use physical devices, e.g., microchips, often impractical and difficult to apply. These could be replaced by remote recognition via the animal's face; if accurate enough, it provides several advantages: it is non-invasive, can work at a distance, and is difficult to counterfeit, as, for instance, in the case of substituting sick animals for healthy ones in the food industry. The few existing datasets with sufficient per-subject images annotated with a single animal identity are not large enough to train current deep learning architectures. We rather investigate the possibility of transfer learning, exploiting pre-trained network models as backbones. Our experiments compared FaceNet, which is specifically trained on large databases of human faces, with the Vision Transformer (ViT) pre-trained on ImageNet, i.e., on object categories. We used three face datasets of very different animals: dogs, primates (lemurs, golden monkeys, and chimpanzees), and cattle. We report the results and, for each dataset, compare them with the state of the art (SOTA) ad hoc-trained deep networks. The capture conditions differ among the three datasets. Image quality (resolution, motion blur, diverse poses, etc.) decreases from dogs to cattle to primates. The best performance was achieved with dogs, where ViT reached a mean verification accuracy of 96.85% and a Rank-1 Identification Rate of 84.34%. The results for endangered primates are still encouraging, but performance varies across animal classes and tasks (verification or identification), and does not always outperform SOTA. For cattle, the ViT results outperform SOTA, while FaceNet is still competitive.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09353
In assisted teleoperation for human-robot collaboration, accurate intention prediction is critical for enabling timely and reliable robotic assistance during long-horizon manipulation and assembly tasks. These systems require continuous understanding of user behavior to recognize actions, anticipate intentions, and detect mistakes in real time. However, robot teleoperation demonstrations are costly and hardware-limited, whereas human demonstrations are easier to collect and provide rich temporal structure. To address this challenge, we propose an uncertainty-aware human-to-robot intention prediction framework that combines: (1) hierarchical transfer learning, where MS-TCN++ is pretrained on human hand demonstrations and fine-tuned on limited robot teleoperation data to capture low-level actions and high-level task intentions; (2) a conformal prediction module that provides frame-level prediction sets with statistical coverage guarantees for reliable uncertainty quantification and early intention estimation; and (3) VLM-guided segment correction, which selectively reviews low-confidence or temporally uncertain segments using visual and temporal context. The framework supports action recognition, temporal segmentation, intention anticipation, and mistake detection for assisted teleoperation. Experiments on robot assembly demonstrations with 22 action classes show that human-to-robot fine-tuning improves the robot test-set Edit score from 70.50 to 80.70 using only 16 robot demonstrations. Edit-safe VLM correction further improves frame accuracy from 45.21% to 46.42% and increases F1@25 and F1@50 while preserving the Edit score. These results show that human demonstrations provide scalable pretraining data for robust, uncertainty-aware robot action segmentation. Code and data: project website.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.08341
We analyse error patterns of raw waveform acoustic models on TIMIT phone recognition beyond the overall phone error rate (PER). PER is decomposed across three broad phonetic class (BPC) categorisations, and confusion matrices are constructed from substitution errors. Our models combine parametric (SincNet, Sinc2Net) or non-parametric CNNs with Bidirectional LSTMs, achieving 13.9%/15.3% PER on Dev/Test, the best reported results for raw waveform models on TIMIT. Transfer learning from WSJ reduces PER to 11.3%/12.3%, surpassing the Filterbank baseline. Per-BPC analysis reveals that BLSTM layers benefit transition-dependent classes most, while WSJ transfer learning improves consonants roughly three times more than vowels. Confusion patterns are consistent across raw waveform and Filterbank systems, indicating that the dominant confusions reflect inherent phonetic similarities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07030