Fine-tuning and adaptation

LoRA, PEFT, instruction tuning and domain adaptation — adapting a pretrained model without paying to train one.

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arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

Learning from Reliable Negatives: Confidence-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for GUI Grounding

The paper introduces a label‑free test‑time training approach for GUI grounding, leveraging confidence patterns in coordinate tokens rather than full‑sequence confidence. It proposes Confidence‑Anchored Learning (CAL) to filter pseudo‑labels and assign distance‑based binary rewards, and extends this to Confidence‑Anchored Negative Learning (CANL) which optimizes solely on negative samples to avoid noisy positives. Experiments show that CANL‑7B achieves 92.1% on ScreenSpot‑V2 and 33.8% on ScreenSpot‑Pro, improving the base model by 8.9%.

By Yizhou Liu, Fei Tang, Yuchen Yan, Zhengxi Lu, Songqin Nong, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Xu, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

IROH: Insightful Ranking Of Humor using Multi-Stage Hybrid Retrieval with Rationale-Distilled LLM Judges for JOKER 2026 Track Task 1 English

arXiv:2609.15618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Our team, VANGUARD, presents IROH (Insightful Ranking of Humor), a three-stage retrieval system for JOKER Task 1 English at CLEF 2026, achieving firs...

By Ana-Maria Luisa Mocanu, Sebastian Mocanu, Ciprian-Octavian Truic\u{a}, Elena-Simona Apostol
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Transfer Learning for Socioeconomic Estimation in Forced-Displacement Settings

The paper presents a transfer‑learning approach that adapts a multimodal spatiotemporal vision transformer, originally trained on Demographic and Health Survey data, to estimate socioeconomic conditions in forced‑displacement settings. Using satellite‑derived geospatial covariates, the adapted model explains up to 66% of variation in socioeconomic outcomes in camp‑intersecting grids and 41% in non‑camp areas, achieving mean absolute errors of 4.37 and 5.41 index points respectively. This framework supplements periodic household surveys by providing regularly updated, spatially granular socioeconomic estimates that bridge data gaps between survey rounds.

By Steven Ndung'u, Adel Daoud, Ismael Yacoubou Djima, Hai-Anh H. Dang, Patrick Michael Brock
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

AMALIA-VL: A Native European Portuguese Open-Source Vision and Language Model

arXiv:2606.19100v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains systematically underserved by existing open...

By Diogo Gl\'oria-Silva, Jo\~ao Cardeira, Manuel Letras da Luz, Afonso Simpl\'icio, Gon\c{c}alo Vinagre, Diogo Tavares, Rafael Ferreira, In\^es Calvo, In\^es Vieira, David Semedo, Jo\~ao Magalh\~aes
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

Query-Conditioned Spherical Centroid Aggregation for Multimodal Retrieval

The paper introduces SCALAR, a query‑conditioned spherical centroid aggregator that assigns relevance‑based weights to each available modality before computing a spherical centroid. SCALAR supports arbitrary modality subsets, is trained with rank‑8 LoRA adapters on masked views, and achieves positive aggregation gains on four of five benchmarks, outperforming prior symmetric aggregators. With only 4.8 million trainable parameters, SCALAR attains the highest text‑to‑video R@1 on three benchmarks and surpasses the released GRAM checkpoint under test‑time modality dropout by 3.2 to 10.9 R@1.

By Ambuj Mehrish, Anindya Nag, Sebastiano Vascon
arXiv AI
Sep 15

UniCAR-RL: Seeing Better before Thinking Deeper in Visual Mathematics

UniCAR‑RL is an annotation‑free reinforcement learning framework designed to improve multimodal large language models’ visual mathematics reasoning. It decouples perception and reasoning by using three branches: Caption‑RL for perception optimization, Reasoning‑RL for logical reasoning with a gold image description, and QA‑RL for end‑to‑end question answering. Experiments show significant gains in mathematical and visual reasoning across various model architectures and scales using only raw short‑answer data.

By Yuzhe Li, Hao Yan, Hao Wang, Xingchen Liu, Ya-Qi Yu, Jihao Wu, Minghui Liao, Wei Chen, Yuliang Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Communication-Efficient LLM Adaptation over Decentralized GPU Meshes

The paper introduces a communication‑efficient method for adapting large language models on decentralized GPU meshes. It proposes an asynchronous two‑circuit system that uses fast compressed training with activation masking for pipeline‑parallel transfer and compressed data‑parallel synchronization, while a slower anchor circuit performs occasional unmasked passes. A spectral correction optimizer then denoises the masked gradients using these anchor priors, enabling high compression rates and achieving up to 40× throughput gains over internet‑grade connections while matching dense uncompressed performance.

By Sameera Ramasinghe, Shamane Siriwardhana, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan, Hadi Mohaghegh Dolatabadi, Chamin P Hewa Koneputugodage, Gil Avraham, Violetta Shevchenko, James Snewin, Karol Pajak, Harry Xi, Alexander Long
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 15

Hyperspectral Image Restoration and Super-resolution with Physics-Aware Deep Learning for Biomedical Applications

The paper introduces a self‑supervised, physics‑aware deep learning method for hyperspectral image restoration and super‑resolution in biomedical imaging. It achieves 16× pixel super‑resolution and 12× faster imaging without external training data, preserving biological integrity across synthetic and experimental samples. The approach also reveals disease‑associated metabolic changes and offers physical insights into the model’s workings, with all code released as open source.

By Yuchen Xiang, Zhaolu Liu, Monica Emili Garcia-Segura, Daniel Simon, Boxuan Cao, Vincen Wu, Kenneth Robinson, Yu Wang, Ronan Battle, Najah Sobhan, Robert T. Murray, Xavier Altafaj, John Marshall, Luca Peruzzotti-Jametti, Zoltan Takats
arXiv AI
Sep 15

A Unified Vision-Language Model for PSMA PET/CT Report Generation, Visual Question Answering, and Lesion Segmentation

arXiv:2609.15603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate PSMA PET/CT interpretation is central to prostate cancer management, yet existing PET/CT AI models typically address isolated tasks. We prop...

By Yang Xing, Jiong Wu, Savas Ozdemir, Yang Zhou, Boxiao Yu, Ying Zhang, Zheren Zhu, Chenyu You, Wei Shao, Yang Lu, Kang Wang, Tinsu Pan, Yang Yang, Kuang Gong
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Open-UniMo: Towards Unified Motion-Language Understanding and Generation in the Open World

arXiv:2609.14615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified motion generation and understanding is crucial for embodied AI systems that can both synthesize and interpret human actions in open-world env...

By Guocun Wang, Kenkun Liu, Guorui Song, Jing Lin, Zhe Huang, Luyuan Zhang, Dake Zhong, Choo Sin Wai, Xiaoguang Han, Haoqian Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Abstract-LoRA: Unlocking Single-Image Style Transfer through Targeted U-Net Block Training

Abstract‑LoRA introduces a lightweight LoRA training approach that targets specific U‑Net blocks in diffusion models to improve single‑image style transfer. By refining block selection, adding more blocks, and using clustering‑based style abstraction, it better disentangles and balances style and content compared to prior methods like B‑LoRA. Experiments show that the method produces more harmonious artistic images while quantitatively preserving both style and content.

By Xinglin Hu