Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are shown to learn general, scale‑invariant topological primitives in their hidden channels, which can be transferred from a teacher to a student model for few‑shot learning. The study introduces a transfer‑learning mechanism that injects pretrained hidden states into a student, improving early optimization and outperforming recurrent and feed‑forward baselines on MNIST benchmarks with only ~9,800 parameters. Mechanistic analysis reveals that hidden channels decouple feature extraction from classification, converging to mutually orthogonal states that absorb morphological complexity.
By Etienne Guichard, Stefano Nichele
The paper presents a configurable multi‑stage vision pipeline for Farmer.Chat, a farm advisory service that processes farmer‑submitted crop photos. It splits the task into a quality gate, a crop detector, and a disease/pest detector, offering two routes: a single fine‑tuned vision‑language model and a set of small specialist models. The new pipeline improves crop accuracy to 95.41% and provides a fast MobileNetV3 quality gate, while retaining the ability to request better photos and answer all queries in one call.
By Naga Ganesh, Chandrashekar M S, Lakshmi Pedapudi, Aakash Singh, Vineet Singh
arXiv:2609.21595v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In-context learning using Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a compelling path to training-free post-OCR correction, yet its effectiveness for Devanag...
By Abhishek Bhandari, Gaurav Harit
arXiv:2609.21039v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A pervasive structural pattern in modern deep learning is the linear factorization block: a submodule of the form $W = BA$ in which two parameter matri...
By Emanuele Zangrando, Marco Sutti, Francesco Tudisco
The paper introduces a three‑stage pipeline to improve accented conversational ASR for speakers from India, Indonesia, and Latin America. It uses heuristic SQL filters to curate entity‑rich training data, regional LoRA adapters fine‑tuned on Qwen2.5‑Omni‑3B to generate both verbatim and corrected transcripts, and a six‑category error taxonomy validated by an LLM judge. The approach raises entity recall to 80‑85% and filler recall to 76‑86%, while keeping WER low (6‑10%) and outperforming Whisper and a commercial ASR on entity recall.
By Fiza Husain, Ankit Pandey, Yash Singh
arXiv:2609.20886v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Business intelligence (BI) is a cornerstone of enterprise decision-making and is widely used by enterprise users in software such as Power BI and Tab...
By Chuxuan Hu, Yeye He, Penny Zhou, Wee Hyong Tok, Daniel Kang, Surajit Chaudhuri
The paper presents the first large‑scale benchmark for uncertainty quantification (UQ) calibration in long‑form scientific question answering, evaluating four UQ methods on 685,000 responses from up to 20 large language models across seven datasets. It shows that instruction tuning leads to token‑level probability polarization, undermining token‑level uncertainty signals, while reasoning model families differ in how they handle this effect. Only semantic consistency—consistency of the final answer—provides well‑calibrated outputs, demonstrating that semantic calibration remains robust in multi‑step, dependency‑rich reasoning.
By Philip M\"uller, Nicholas Popovi\v{c}, Michael F\"arber, Peter Steinbach
The paper introduces the COmmunity-centered Peer Engaged Support (COPES) dataset and a three‑axis evaluation framework to gauge how well Large Language Models (LLMs) align with community perspectives on mental‑health support queries. Experiments show that fine‑tuning LLMs on COPES improves strategy alignment and emotion‑tone alignment by over 50% for general‑purpose models, yet these gains are uneven across subreddits and coping strategies. The study also finds that post‑training shifts the model’s recommendations toward problem‑focused advice while reducing emotion‑focused responses, indicating persistent disparities in performance across different communities and needs.
By Mohit Chandra, Nabin Kim, Eli Min, Aamogh Sawant, Tanmay Sutar, Munmun De Choudhury
The paper proposes a method for culturally aligning large language models (LLMs) using soft prompt tuning optimized via Differential Evolution (DE). Unlike traditional fine‑tuning or reinforcement learning, this approach keeps model weights frozen and requires no preference data, instead leveraging aggregated survey scores from Hofstede's Value Survey Module (VSM13). Experiments on four countries and four instruction‑tuned models show that DE‑optimized prompts reduce cultural discrepancy, improve agreement with the World Values Survey, and are preferred in blinded pairwise evaluations by LLM judges.
By Reem I. Masoud, Martin Ferianc, Philip Treleaven, Miguel Rodrigues
KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.
By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz
The paper introduces a training strategy for cascaded simultaneous speech translation that allows the system to dynamically decide how much of the source prefix to translate. By fine‑tuning a large language model (Qwen3‑8B) on stable prefixes—pairs of source prefixes and the longest shared translation with the full sentence—the authors enable contextual read‑write decisions beyond fixed wait‑k or target‑suffix deletion. Experiments on English‑to‑German, Japanese, and Chinese demonstrate that stable prefixes improve the quality‑latency tradeoff across various test sets.
By Hieu Hoang, Amittai Axelrod, Matt Post
OneBid is a unified auto‑bidding foundation model that consolidates diverse cost‑per‑X (oCPX) advertising scenarios into a single framework. It builds on Decision Transformer by conditioning on two atomic signals—Return‑to‑Go for conversion value and Cost‑to‑Go for cost ratio—and incorporates value‑aware regularization. A sequence‑level Mixture‑of‑Experts architecture captures cross‑scenario knowledge while preserving low latency, and a Critic‑guided Relative Offline Policy optimization (CROP) aligns the backbone with scenario‑specific preferences without unsafe online exploration. In production at Kuaishou, OneBid achieved a 2.2% overall ADVV increase and up to 13.1% in the ROAS scenario.
By Yewen Li, Peng Jiang, Yitian Li, Pengfei Lv, Xialong Liu, Peng Jiang, Qingpeng Cai
The study evaluates automatic tooth segmentation on panoramic radiographs using a large annotated corpus of 1,422 images and 42,142 tooth polygons. It finds that increasing input resolution improves boundary precision (mask mAP50‑95 rises from 0.656 to 0.717) while detection performance remains unchanged, and that architectural changes have minimal impact on in‑domain accuracy. Targeted interventions such as LoRA adaptation, promptable foundation models, and anatomical label assignment provide negligible gains, indicating that resolution and acquisition diversity should be prioritized over model novelty.
By Muhammad Rehan, Moaz Amjad, Syed Danial Ahmed, Mariam Adnan, Haider Ali
The paper introduces a 12,000-instance dataset of two-option moral dilemmas covering three pairwise value conflicts—Honesty vs. Justice, Justice vs. Autonomy, and Autonomy vs. Honesty—translated into Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese to test cross‑lingual behavior. Benchmarking on GPT‑5‑mini shows a consistent preference for Honesty over Autonomy across all languages when no policy is provided, while Llama‑3.2‑1/3B models exhibit a strong first‑option bias that is largely eliminated by plain fine‑tuning or Direct Preference Optimization, raising accuracy above 98%. The authors propose a task vector transfer method that orthogonalizes value preference vectors with respect to general instruction‑following vectors, effectively isolating specific value directions and enabling task arithmetic to flip a model’s stance.
By Utkarsh Agarwal, Monojit Choudhury
The paper investigates the effect of using semantic positive pairs—different instances of the same class—in self‑supervised visual representation learning. By creating matched ImageNet‑1K subsets of augmented pairs and manually curated semantic pairs, the authors compare contrastive and non‑contrastive SSL methods under identical training conditions. Across transfer learning and object detection tasks, semantic‑pair pretraining consistently outperforms augmented‑pair pretraining, with contrastive methods like SimCLR showing the largest gains, indicating that semantic pairs foster additional invariances beyond standard augmentations.
By Mohammad Alkhalefi, Georgios Leontidis, Mingjun Zhong
Rhamba is a region‑aware pretraining framework for resting‑state fMRI that combines anatomically guided masking with hybrid Attention‑Mamba architectures. The study pretrained models on the ABIDE dataset using three masking strategies (Any, Majority, Pure) and evaluated four architectural variants, finding that the Mamba‑Attention (MA) hybrid achieved the best average AUROC on downstream schizophrenia and ADHD classification tasks. Explainable AI via Integrated Gradients highlighted that performance depends on the interaction between masking strategy and architecture rather than a single dominant configuration.
By Pankaj Pandey, Ruthwik Reddy Doodipala, Pratheek Eranki, Carolina Torres-Rojas, Manob Jyoti Saikia, Ranganatha Sitaram
The paper proposes using ultrathin metalenses to physically encode metric depth cues into two polarized optical wavefronts, enabling accurate monocular depth estimation. By aligning a pretrained depth foundation model with these optical signals through direct fine‑tuning, and by creating a simulation pipeline to generate realistic metalens responses from RGB‑D data, the authors bridge the gap between nanophotonics and learned depth priors. Experiments show that this method surpasses conventional monocular metric depth estimation and depth‑from‑defocus baselines.
By Bingxuan Li, Jiahao Wu, Yuan Xu, Zezheng Zhu, Yunxiang Zhang, Kenneth Chen, Yanqi Liang, Nanfang Yu, Qi Sun
The paper introduces a benchmarking framework that evaluates open-weight Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) for face recognition by treating explanation quality as a core metric. It defines two key criteria for explanations—relevance, meaning reliance on identity‑stable facial features, and faithfulness, meaning alignment with the visible image content without hallucinations. Using this framework, the authors benchmark several VLM families, jointly assessing face verification accuracy and explanation quality, and find that current models still exhibit shortcomings in their explanations, underscoring the importance of explanation metrics for a complete performance assessment.
By Laurent Colbois, S\'ebastien Marcel
arXiv:2606.03963v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning enables autonomous robots to learn complex navigation tasks, but still relies heavily on time consuming manual re...
By Roohan Ahmed Khan, Yasheerah Yaqoot, Amir Atef Habel, Muhammad Ahsan Mustafa, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Large language models are increasingly used as automated reviewers in scientific evaluation, creating a recursive feedback loop where later reviewers learn from earlier model-generated judgments. A study using Llama 3.1 8B fine‑tuned on ICLR reviews shows that incorporating synthetic reviews compresses rating distributions and reduces semantic diversity, a phenomenon termed scientific‑judgment collapse. To counter this, the authors introduce TrustReviewer, an open‑source LLM system that curates training data and applies paired activation steering at test time to preserve judgment diversity and improve recommendation alignment.
By Sy-Tuyen Ho, Minghui Liu, Furong Huang