The paper critically evaluates common few‑shot learning protocols that rely on pre‑training a model on a large auxiliary set with classes disjoint from the target but drawn from the same visual domain. By comparing no pre‑training, class‑disjoint in‑domain pre‑training, supervised out‑of‑domain pre‑training, and label‑free out‑of‑domain pre‑training across eight datasets and three architectures, the authors find that in‑domain pre‑training yields a 33.41‑point average improvement, while out‑of‑domain pre‑training offers a 23.75‑point gain, revealing a 9.66‑point optimistic bias due to domain overlap. They also demonstrate that a label‑free augmentation strategy can match supervised out‑of‑domain performance and propose a descriptor‑based source‑selection method that closely approximates oracle selection, underscoring the need to move beyond in‑domain pre‑training as the default evaluation protocol.
By Alejandro Galan-Cuenca, Marcelo Saval-Calvo, Antonio Javier Gallego
The paper introduces Spectral Transductive Refinement (STR), a training‑free method that refines class prototypes at test time using the geometry of a joint k‑nearest‑neighbour graph and a normalized‑Laplacian spectral coordinate system. STR operates solely on frozen visual embeddings, iteratively updating pseudo‑labelled queries to improve one‑shot and few‑shot classification under domain shift. Experiments on ResNet‑18 and ResNet‑10 backbones show STR outperforms single‑prototype baselines and rivals meta‑trained cross‑domain few‑shot methods, achieving the best 1‑shot average across eight target domains.
By Fahim Rahman, S. M. Tanjeeb Meheran Rohan, Md. Taimum Ibne Sayed, Asaduzzaman Herok, Md. Bakhtiar Hasan
ReVisIT is a train‑free framework that turns retrieved image‑label pairs into units of visual thought, combining structured class definitions, multimodal retrieval, and alternating user/assistant injection before joint decoding. On several benchmarks—including Fast Open MiniImageNet, Bongard‑OpenWorld, and the newly released MAAC‑Bench—ReVisIT achieves performance comparable to or surpassing large, trained models while using far fewer parameters. The approach demonstrates that high‑quality retrieval and a simple turns layer can provide a universal performance boost across diverse multimodal tasks.
By Bingchen Huang, Zhiling Wang, Yifu Chen, Yuanchao Du
The paper introduces the Within-Instance Prototypical Transformer (WIPT), a method that performs single-query test-time prototype adaptation by jointly transforming an unlabelled query with labelled support embeddings to form query-specific class means. Using a frozen ViT-S/16 encoder trained on miniImageNet and evaluated on CUB, EuroSAT, and ISIC, WIPT improves 1‑shot performance on CUB and EuroSAT but not on ISIC, while in 5‑shot settings it outperforms a support‑only Transformer on ISIC but remains weaker than ProtoNet overall. The study also explores multi‑query processing, memory and latency trade‑offs, and analyzes how WIPT alters uncertain versus confident predictions, concluding that the method offers a streaming‑compatible test‑time adaptation that can enhance low‑shot cross‑domain decisions without target‑time optimization.
By Rushab Rasik Karania, Tomas Maul
arXiv:2603. 12478v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal instruction tuning is often compute-inefficient because training budgets are spread across large mixed image-video pools whose utility is highly uneven.
By Rujie Wu, Haozhe Zhao, Hai Ci, Yizhou Wang
arXiv:2607. 16283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of generative AI has outpaced our ability to reliably detect its outputs, particularly when detectors encounter generators they have not seen before.
By Md Faraz Kabir Khan, Saeed Anwar, Ghulam Mubashar Hassan
FAVE (Foveated Adaptive Visual Encoding) is a lightweight, variable‑resolution Vision Transformer that encodes user‑selected image regions at high acuity while maintaining the image’s native geometry. In controlled experiments on small‑object ImageNet crops, FAVE outperforms a fixed‑resolution ViT by 9.4 top‑1 points while using 12.7× fewer FLOPs. When added as a local branch to FastVLM, FAVE improves TextVQA by 1.60 points and GQA attribute accuracy by 1.31 points, achieving a 3.3× speedup over SmolVLM2-2.2B with only 16 extra local tokens.
By Amitangshu Mukherjee, Kaushik Roy
The paper introduces a method that transforms knowledge graph facts into a fixed vocabulary representation, where each fact becomes a node linked to its subject, object, and relation type via six meta-relations. Using this representation, standard GNNs (e.g., GAT, GINE, GraphSAGE, R-GCN) trained on a single small graph can achieve zero‑shot link prediction on 40 inductive benchmarks, matching the performance of specialized foundation models like ULTRA. The approach also generalizes to relational databases, enabling foreign‑key prediction without cell values or schema text, and the authors provide code, checkpoints, and evaluation tools for all benchmarks.
By Camille Pradel
arXiv:2605. 29539v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language foundation models have shown promising zero-shot generalization for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD).
By Jiacong Liu, Shu Luo, Yikai Qin, Yaze Zhao, Yongwei Jiang, Yixiong Zou
arXiv:2606. 09245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot object detection has gained widely attention in recent years.
By Yuan Zeng, Bin Song, Jie Guo, Yuwen Chen
arXiv:2607. 17467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Few-shot Test-Time Domain Adaptation (FSTT-DA) seeks to adapt models to novel domains using only a handful of unlabeled target samples.
By Siobhan Reid, Zhixiang Chi, Li Gu, Omid Reza Heidari, Ziqiang Wang, Yang Wang
arXiv:2606. 24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence.
By Jonas Klotz, Cassio F. Dantas, Pallavi Jain, Diego Marcos, Beg\"um Demir