We present a reproducibility study of XFeat, a lightweight local feature extractor and matcher designed to identify corresponding points across images efficiently on resource-constrained hardware. We re-implement the architecture based on the paper and supplementary material, re-evaluate the authors' released checkpoint alongside our re-implementation, and conduct additional architectural ablations to examine design choices that were not fully justified in the original work.
arXiv:2607. 14287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Defect segmentation in additive manufacturing (AM) X-ray computed tomography (XCT) images remains challenging due to severe class imbalance and large distribution shifts across scan conditions.
By Md Mahedi Hasan, Md Mushfiqur Rahaman, Alan Pachkovskiy, Imtiaz Ahmed, Jeremy Dawson, Srinjoy Das
The study audits the AION-1 foundation model, a 39‑modality transformer trained on over 200 million astronomical objects, and finds that its reliance on a survey detection channel—specifically the segmentation map—introduces a severe systematic bias. By keeping image tokens unchanged and editing only the segmentation map, all model outputs (flux, size, ellipticity, redshift) shift by factors of 110–4400 compared to a placebo, revealing that the model’s predictions are driven more by detection gating than by the actual light distribution. This bias propagates into cosmological analyses, shifting tomographic mean redshifts by a median 0.71 × the LSST DESC requirement and exceeding it in multiple assignments, while removing the detection channel eliminates the effect without measurable cost.
whyItMatters":"The bias in the detection channel directly inflates errors in key astronomical measurements, potentially compromising the precision of cosmological studies that rely on accurate redshift estimates."
By Ihor Kendiukhov
arXiv:2608. 09519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a reproducibility study of XFeat, a lightweight local feature extractor and matcher designed to identify corresponding points across images efficiently on resource-constrained hardware.
By Lazar {\DJ}okovi\'c, Aimee Lin
arXiv:2607. 27501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a lightweight approach to foundation modeling (\textbf{NEXUS}) that leverages pre-trained learning from collider physics data towards out-of-domain tasks in other scientific datasets, using a fully connected autoencoder model with approximately 3 million parameters.
By Liangyu Wu, Qibin Liu, Alexander Yue, Julia Gonski
arXiv:2607. 04449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-boundary maps support crop monitoring, irrigation planning, and yield estimation, but many smallholder parcels span only a few 10 m Sentinel-2 pixels.
By Isaac Corley, Caleb Robinson, Jennifer Marcus, Hannah Kerner
arXiv:2606. 02778v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: I present EXOVEIL, a transit detection system that learns what a star's brightness should look like and flags when reality disagrees.
By Pratik Priyanshu
arXiv:2606. 14999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific user facilities generate X-ray scattering data faster than traditional workflows can process them.
By Monika Choudhary, Xiaoya Chong, Runbo Jiang, Wiebke Koepp, Petrus H. Zwart, Damon English, Gregory M. Su, Eric Schaible, Chenhui Zhu, Mostafa Nassr, Noah P. Wamble, Kelvin Kam-Yun Li, Jonathan M. Chan, Jose Carlos Diaz, Cameron McKay, Lynn Katz, Benny Freeman, Guillaume Freychet, Yevgen Matviychuk, Eliot Gann, Daniel B. Allan, Benedikt Sochor, Frank Schluenzen, Stephan V. Roth, Ethan Crumlin, Dylan McReynolds, Tanny Chavez, Alexander Hexemer
STRADAViT is a self‑supervised continued‑pretraining framework that adapts Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones for radio‑astronomy image analysis. It curates mixed‑survey data, generates radio‑astronomy‑aware training views, and initializes encoders with ViT‑MAE, optionally adding register tokens. Evaluations on three morphology benchmarks (MiraBest, LoTSS DR2, and Radio Galaxy Zoo) show that a register‑based two‑stage checkpoint improves linear‑probe Macro‑F1 scores over the ViT‑MAE baseline and enhances fine‑tuning on MiraBest and RGZ DR1, though performance on LoTSS DR2 fine‑tuning declines; these differences are statistically significant.
By Andrea DeMarco, Ian Fenech Conti, Hayley Camilleri, Ardiana Bushi, Simone Riggi
arXiv:2607. 28994v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-fidelity radio fields are typically simulated for every scene--transmitter configuration or fitted separately to each scene, failing to exploit propagation structures shared across environments.
By Chaozheng Wen, Chenghong Bian, Hongze Chen, Jun Zhang
Panda Diplomacy introduces a point‑cloud self‑distillation framework that enables a single foundation‑model architecture and objective to be pre‑trained across three distinct particle‑detector modalities—liquid argon time‑projection chambers, collider TPCs, and water Cherenkov detectors—without extensive modification. Using only 1,000 labeled images for downstream adaptation, the resulting Panda V2 model matches or surpasses specialized baselines that require orders of magnitude more supervision, achieving state‑of‑the‑art particle‑clustering performance with 70× fewer labeled events on sPHENIX and up to 1,000× fewer labels on LArTPC data. Linear probes further demonstrate that the model’s latent space captures physically meaningful structures such as particle causality and track curvature.
By Samuel Young, C\'esar Jes\'us-Valls, Kazuhiro Terao