Degradation

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16 papers in the last four weeks, up 33% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 133

Jul 2, 2026cs.CV

Robust Image Processing Techniques for Construction Environment Monitoring Using Underwater Robots

This paper proposes a robust image processing framework for underwater robot-based construction environment monitoring, targeting complex degradations observed in real marine environments. Unlike conventional approaches that mainly consider absorption and backscattering, real underwater imagery is strongly affected by depth-dependent forward scattering blur and particle-induced degradations such as marine snow. To address this, we introduce a staged processing pipeline that sequentially models background degradation via depth-aware forward scattering and foreground degradation using realistic marine snow patterns extracted from real images. The resulting synthetic data are used to retrain an existing Joint-ID network without modifying its architecture, enabling an isolated evaluation of dataset realism. In addition, a lightweight post-processing scheme is applied to enhance contrast and structural clarity. Experiments on real underwater datasets collected in Korean coastal environments demonstrate consistent improvements in visual quality and UIQM scores. The results indicate that explicitly modeling forward scattering and realistic particle effects effectively reduces the synthetic-to-real gap and improves practical applicability in real-world underwater robotic operations.

Seunghee Yun, Geonmo Yang, Juhui Lee +3

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Inha University · Hyundai Engineering & Construction Co., Ltd · Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Inha University

Underwater Object Detection Underwater Robots Visual Degradation Degradation Construction

Jun 29, 2026cs.CV

PGE-SAM: Prompt-Guided Feature Enhancement for Interactive Segmentation under Degradation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized promptable image segmentation with strong zero-shot generalization. However, its performance degrades substantially under real-world imaging artifacts such as noise, blur, and compression. Existing methods restore features globally without focusing on segmentation-relevant regions and neglect SAM's iterative refinement mechanism, leading to suboptimal performance in interactive settings. We propose Prompt-Guided Feature Enhancement SAM (PGE-SAM), a framework that explicitly leverages user prompts and prior mask predictions to spatially guide the feature restoration process toward regions of interest through a Prompt Guidance Generator. To recover fine-grained details lost under degradation, we introduce Multi-Scale Features Interaction to incorporate low-level encoder features, along with a Foreground Reconstruction Loss that restricts feature-level supervision to the segmentation target. Furthermore, we present DM-Seg, a benchmark for interactive segmentation on degraded medical images, spanning multiple imaging modalities with both general and modality-specific degradations at varying severity levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PGE-SAM achieves SOTA robustness on both medical and natural image domains across multiple degradation levels, while maintaining generalization to clean images and adding less than one-fifth of the parameters of prior methods.

Tuan-Duc Nguyen, Anh-Tuan Mai, Duc-Trong Le

FPT Software AI Center · VNU University of Engineering and Technology

Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation Query-Specific Degradation-Aware Representation Image Enhancement Enhancement Degradation

Jun 28, 2026cs.CV

Spatially Localized Image Degradation Embeddings for Image Quality Assessment

Self-supervised learning (SSL) currently drives state-of-the-art performance in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). However, standard SSL pipelines uniformly apply synthetic distortions across the entire image field, which can limit their sensitivity to spatially localized and co-occurring degradations encountered in real-world content. In this work, we empirically expose this representational blind spot across existing state-of-the-art encoders, demonstrating their reduced sensitivity to spatially bounded image degradations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Spatial Localized Image Degradation Embeddings for Image Quality Assessment (SLIDE-IQA). SLIDE-IQA employs a dual-branch Vision Transformer framework that injects spatially bounded degradations into a contrastive pretraining objective. To handle the spatial complexity of these degradations, we introduce a Threshold-Bounded Exclusion Mechanism, a representational design choice that resolves structural conflicts arising from spatially localized distortions to ensure the latent space respects both degradation type and spatial scale. Finally, we show that SLIDE-IQA's synthetic-only pretraining significantly improves sensitivity to localized distortions, while achieving competitive performance on NR-IQA benchmarks against existing SSL NR-IQA models.

Krishna Srikar Durbha, Hassene Tmar, Ping-Hao Wu +2

The University of Texas at Austin · Meta Platforms, Inc. · University of Colorado Boulder

Query-Specific Degradation-Aware Representation Image Quality Assessment Visual Embeddings Degradation Vision Transformer Blind Spots

Jun 26, 2026cs.CL

SEAD: Competence-Aware On-Policy Distillation via Entropy-Guided Supervision

On-policy distillation (OPD) has a property absent in offline distillation and RL: teacher supervision quality depends on student competence. Incoherent rollouts yield noisy gradients; already-mastered tokens yield redundant ones. This creates waste at three scales (tokens, training phases, and prompts) yet existing methods supervise uniformly. We introduce SEAD, which uses entropy as a unified probe of this competence-dependent degradation at three scales: (1) joint teacher-student entropy partitions tokens into zones receiving tailored divergences or zero gradient (approx. 50% skipped); (2) a cosine schedule anneals from forward to reverse KL as competence grows; (3) a competence-gated curriculum introduces prompts easy-to-hard. These components are symbiotically necessary: token selection requires coherent rollouts (curriculum), annealing requires monotonic improvement (also curriculum). On OLMo-3 (7B to 32B), SEAD achieves +4.8 avg accuracy over vanilla OPD across six math benchmarks, with ablations confirming super-additive interactions.

Chia-Hsuan Lee, Zelei Cheng, Yu Wang +4

Capital One

Curriculum Entropy Degradation

Jun 26, 2026cs.CV

BiDeMem: Bidirectional Degradation Memory for Explainable Image Restoration

Degradation-aware prompts, conditions, and latent priors are increasingly used in image restoration, yet they are usually judged by a single endpoint: whether the restored image obtains higher PSNR. This is a weak test of semantics. A condition can help by adding capacity, acting as a global correction bias, or exploiting dataset shortcuts, without becoming an interpretable degradation prior. We propose BiDeMem, a bidirectional degradation memory for explainable image restoration. A query built from restoration features and input statistics retrieves a compact top-k subset of memory slots. The same selected slot identity supports the restoration path at inference time and a training-only forward-degradation explanation path. The study centers on verifiability in a controlled multi-degradation NAFNet setting. New controls separate the gain from a correction head alone, a dense query prior, and a static global prior: these variants are 0.2588, 0.2586, and 0.2839 dB below BiRank, respectively. Strong residual supervision and a wider degradation head also remain below the full bidirectional memory model. Intervention probes show that BiRank preserves restoration quality while increasing wrong-prior and native-prior sensitivity, framing degradation memory as both a restoration module and a falsifiable explanation mechanism.

Xinrui Wu, Lichen Huang

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Query-Specific Degradation-Aware Representation Image Restoration Degradation Restoration

Jun 25, 2026cs.CL

How Surprising Is Historical Italian to Language Models? Tokenization Tax, Comprehension Tax, and a Simple Mitigation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly critical to digital library workflows, yet their ability to process historical language remains poorly understood. Historical difficulty is typically treated as a monolithic barrier, conflating orthographic variation, linguistic distance, and pretraining exposure. In this paper, we propose a diagnostic framework that decomposes this difficulty into four distinct dimensions: tokenization cost, predictive uncertainty (surprisal), semantic robustness, and context sensitivity. We evaluate this framework on three datasets spanning three centuries: (1) a newly curated corpus of 17th-century Italian texts (1610-1689) digitized from original page images; (2) canonical 19th-century Italian "I Promessi Sposi" serving as a high-exposure control; and (3) 18th-century Russian civil print books as a contrastive orthographic stress test. Our results reveal a distinct dissociation between encoding cost and comprehension. While Russian and early modern Italian incur comparable tokenization penalties (25-30% inflation), their predictive difficulty diverges sharply. 17th-century Italian is on average 2.4 times more surprising than its modern equivalent - with academic prose reaching 3.2 times - whereas Russian shows only a modest increase. But predictive uncertainty does not imply representational degradation: embedding similarity remains robust (> 0.85) across all datasets, confirming that models can represent historical meaning even when generation is unstable. Finally, we demonstrate that a minimal temporal context prompt reduces historical surprisal by approximately 60%, offering a simple, model-agnostic mitigation. These findings suggest that while historical text imposes a consistent encoding tax, digital libraries can safely deploy LLMs for semantic retrieval tasks, provided that generative applications are carefully adapted.

Maria Levchenko

University of Bologna

Italian Texts Accents Mitigation Degradation

Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

Ultra-Fusion: A Resilient Tightly-Coupled Multi-Sensor Fusion SLAM Framework under Sensor Degradation and Spatiotemporal Perturbation for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Reliable localization is essential for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), including autonomous vehicles, quadruped last-mile carriers, and infrastructure-inspection unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although tightly-coupled multi-sensor fusion improves accuracy in favorable conditions, deployed systems remain vulnerable to sensor degradation -- poor illumination, LiDAR degeneracy, wheel slippage, and GNSS outage -- and to spatiotemporal calibration errors. These failures are common in urban canyons, tunnels, and high-speed corridors, where localization drift can degrade route tracking, tunnel passage continuity, and local map alignment. This paper presents Ultra-Fusion, a tightly-coupled multi-sensor localization framework based on a unified sliding-window estimator. Asynchronous measurements are timestamp-ordered and converted into optional factors within one optimization window, supporting WIO, VIO, LIO, and LVIO with optional wheel and GNSS augmentation. Observability-aware initialization selects the bootstrap mode, factor-wise reliability scheduling gates degraded measurements, and online LiDAR--IMU spatiotemporal calibration refines temporal offsets and rotational extrinsics during operation. We extend the M3DGR benchmark with simulation trajectories and evaluate more than 60 open-source SLAM systems on M3DGR, M2DGR-Plus, KAIST, GrandTour, and MARS-LVIG. The results show competitive accuracy across wheeled, legged, and aerial platforms under long-duration and high-speed operation, degradation, and calibration perturbation, improving localization availability for road-level autonomy, campus and warehouse mobility, and low-altitude aerial inspection. To benefit the industrial and academic community, we will release source code and datasets upon paper acceptance.

Yihong Tian, Junjie Zhang, Liuyang Li +3

Beijing Institute of Technology · Chongqing University · Sichuan University +2

Multi-Sensor Fusion Simultaneous Localization And Mapping Global Navigation Satellite System Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Detection Spatiotemporal Degradation

Jun 17, 2026cs.CV

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

Yanjie Tu, Qingsen Yan, Axi Niu +3

School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710000, China · Shenzhen Research Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University, Shenzhen 518057, China · State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, University of Macau, Macau 999078, China

Image Restoration Restoration Degradation

Jun 17, 2026cs.LG

Correcting Sensor-Induced Distribution Drift with Wasserstein Adversarial Learning

The quality of recorded data depends on the stability of the sensor system that acquires it. Sensor motion and aging can degrade the performance and stability of downstream data-driven methods. We present a Wasserstein-GAN-inspired approach for unsupervised inference of physically interpretable transformation parameters that map a changed detector response distribution back to a nominal reference distribution. In contrast to standard generative modeling, the generator is used as a learnable calibration transformation whose trainable weights represent the sought parameters, while the critic provides a distributional distance signal via the Wasserstein objective. We validate the approach on a tracking-detector toy model with controlled layer shifts and demonstrate its application on high-granularity Geant4-simulated calorimeter data with cell-wise aging effects. The method recovers aging coefficients for individual cells with correlation to ground truth and improves agreement between calibrated and reference energy-sum distributions, while exhibiting the expected degradation at increasing channel-to-channel noise levels. These results indicate that adversarial distribution matching can serve as a data-driven component of calibration strategies in settings where direct labels for degradation parameters are unavailable.

Saraa Ali, Vladimir Bocharnikov, Fedor Ratnikov +3

Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis, HSE University, Pokrovsky Boulevard 11, Moscow 109028, Russia

Recalibration Distribution Shifts Calibrated Uncertainty Degradation Wasserstein Gradient Flows Distributions

Jun 16, 2026cs.LG

Quantum Annealing Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Accurate Remaining Useful Lifetime Prediction

Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation is central to predictive maintenance, where an unplanned failure can cost far more than the asset itself. Statistical degradation models miss the strong nonlinearity of real systems, and data-driven models often converge to suboptimal solutions in high-dimensional, non-convex search spaces. We propose a Quantum Annealing enhanced Q-Learning (QAQL) framework that couples the sampling behaviour of quantum annealing with the sequential decision making of Q-learning. Each Q-value update is encoded as a small quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) whose ground state is the greedy action; rather than acting as a deterministic optimizer, the annealer returns a distribution over near-optimal actions across many reads, and this stochastic action selection supplies the exploration that curbs premature convergence on nonlinear degradation trajectories. The QUBO is solved on the D-Wave Advantage system using minor embedding, with the annealer woven into the reinforcement-learning loop rather than bolted on after training. We validate QAQL on two public benchmarks: the NASA C-MAPSS turbofan engine datasets and a device-fleet predictive maintenance dataset. Averaged over many independent runs and across six error metrics, QAQL outperforms the classical and quantum baselines considered in this study, with statistically significant improvements. The results indicate that quantum annealing is a usable, not merely theoretical, optimizer inside a reinforcement-learning loop for industrial predictive-maintenance applications.

Manoranjan Gandhudi, Arunkumar V., G. R. Anil +1

Central University of Karnataka, Kalaburagi, India · University College of Engineering, Anna University, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India · AIONOS India Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad, India +1

Quantum Annealing Useful Life Prediction Predictive Maintenance Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization Q-Learning Annealing+1

Jun 16, 2026cs.CV

Universal Image Restoration via Internalized Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Image restoration seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded inputs but becomes highly ill-posed under complex, mixed degradations. While unified all-in-one models are common, their performance declines as degradation complexity increases. Recent works adopt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-round restoration using specialized modules. However, this approach faces two key limitations: (i) increased computational cost due to multi-step processing, and (ii) weak modeling of interactions between degradations during stepwise inference. We introduce CoTIR, a universal image restoration framework that internalizes CoT reasoning within a single model. Concretely, we view image restoration as a specialized subtask of image editing, which implies that a large-scale pre-trained editing model provides a more favorable optimization starting point. Building on this, we fine-tune the model for restoration and further encode structured CoT-style reasoning into the learning objective via a differentiable formulation inspired by Lagrangian optimization, enabling holistic restoration without chaining specialized restorers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further present CoTIR-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 5.2 million samples with CoT-style reasoning traces. Extensive experiments on CoTIR-Bench and broad real composite degradation scenes show that CoTIR achieves stronger perceptual quality and more competitive fidelity than both all-in-one models and multi-round restoration methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/gy65896/CoTIR.

Yu Guo, Zhengru Fang, Shengfeng He +4

Hong Kong JC Lab of Smart City and the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong · School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University · Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University

Image Restoration Restoration Degradation Perceptual Quality Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Reasoning Chain

Jun 16, 2026cs.CL

Scaling Enterprise Agent Routing: Degradation, Diagnosis, and Recovery

Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales? We study single-step routing on a 110-agent, 584-tool catalog from a deployed enterprise productivity assistant, evaluating three frontier models from 10 to 110 agents. Routing F1 on under-specified requests drops 16--23 percentage points across models. An oracle analysis decomposes the degradation into a \emph{retrieval} gap (the model cannot surface the right tool) and a \emph{confusion} gap (even with perfect retrieval, the oracle ceiling drops 10pp). Embedding-based shortlisting recovers +10--11pp F1 at full scale across all three models and two providers. A production annotation study (1,435 human-labeled utterances, three annotators) confirms the recovery on real traffic at +10--17pp despite 10--15pp lower absolute performance.

Kellen Gillespie, Robyn Perry

Superhuman, Inc.

Large Language Model Routing Diagnosis Degradation

Jun 15, 2026cs.LG

Autonomous End-to-End SOH Prediction Services for Battery Systems via Temporal-Contrastive Representation Learning

Accurate state of health (SOH) estimation is a critical diagnostic service for lithium-ion battery management. However, reliance on labor-intensive manual feature engineering and opaque black-box models hinders scalable industrial deployment. To address this, we introduce TC-SOH: a modular, plug-and-play service architecture for autonomous, end-to-end SOH prediction. TC-SOH employs a temporal-contrastive mechanism and a cross-window prediction pretext task to extract degradation-relevant representations directly from raw operational data. To improve transparency, we connect model efficacy with representation diagnostics: visualization, sensitivity analysis, redundancy analysis, bidirectional probing, future-SOH probing, and temporal shuffling show that learned features overlap with selected expert descriptors while retaining additional SOH-relevant variation, and that ordered temporal context improves subsequent-SOH prediction. Across four public datasets, TC-SOH outperforms the considered physics-informed and data-driven baselines, reducing MAPE by 1.91 times and RMSE by 2.13 times.

Junting Wen, Dan Li, Qihao Quan +8

School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai 519082, China · Tianneng Battery Group Co., Ltd, Zhejiang, China · School of Communication Engineering, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China +1

Lithium-Ion Batteries Degradation Contrastive Learning Patient Trajectories

Jun 15, 2026cs.CV

DDTNet: Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network for Test-Time All-in-One De-weathering Adaptation

All-in-one adverse weather image restoration aims to remove multiple degradations, such as rain, haze, and snow, using a single unified model. Despite their broad applicability, existing methods typically compromise performance, delivering balanced but suboptimal results for individual degradation types. This issue becomes more pronounced when a domain gap exists between training and testing data. Motivated by the observation that modeling degradation patterns is more feasible than recovering clean content, we propose the Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network (DDTNet), which focuses specifically on degradation transfer. By disentangling degradation patterns from target-domain degraded images and transferring them to source domain clean images, DDTNet generates domain-adaptive paired training data. These pairs are then used to fine-tune restoration models, significantly enhancing their adaptability across diverse weather conditions and domains. The core of DDTNet is the Degradation Disentanglement Module (DDM), which comprises Degradation Coupled Attention (DCA) to capture both general and weather-specific features, thereby enabling effective disentanglement and transfer of degradation patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that DDTNet significantly and consistently improves existing all-in-one models across real-world deraining, desnowing, and dehazing datasets.

Kuan-Hung Lin, Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng +3

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 300093, Taiwan · National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 300044, Taiwan · National Chengchi University, Taipei 116011, Taiwan +1

Query-Specific Degradation-Aware Representation Image Restoration Degradation

Jun 14, 2026cs.NI

Hidden Degradation Costs in Energy-Cost-Only HEMS Optimisation: Study on Battery and PV Sensitivity

Residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) are increasingly deployed alongside photovoltaic (PV) generation to reduce household energy costs under volatile time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. Model predictive control (MPC) is a widely adopted optimisation strategy for home energy management systems (HEMS), typically formulated to minimise net energy cost, subject to physical and operational constraints. However, battery degradation is rarely embedded in the optimisation objective, meaning its cost is unquantified and aggressive; high-cycle-count strategies could incur significant losses once deployed to physical systems. This paper presents a receding-horizon mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) baseline for a UK residential HEMS, using demand data from the REFIT dataset. A 3 by 3 sensitivity study is conducted across three battery sizes and three PV array sizes, with post-hoc degradation cost estimated using the Naumann stress model and rainflow cycle counting. Results show that degradation remains constant for each battery size and can exceed energy cost savings by up to 1,060 %. These results demonstrate that energy-cost-only optimisation systematically underestimates the true system cost, motivating a degradation-aware control formulation.

Dawood Butt, Nandor Verba

WMG, The University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

Battery Energy Storage Systems Lithium-Ion Batteries Energy-Efficient Photovoltaic Degradation Model Predictive Control+1

Jun 10, 2026cs.CV

ERN-Net : Evolving Reason Node-Net for Document Binarization

This paper presents ERN-Net, an Evolving Reason Node-Net for efficient document image binarization. ERN-Net enhances degradation-sensitive regions, such as faint strokes, broken characters, and noisy backgrounds, through evolving reason nodes and multi-scale reasoning. We further compare ResNet-101, ConvNeXt-Tiny, and ConvNeXt-Base, and find that ConvNeXt-Tiny provides the best practical trade-off between accuracy and memory usage. In addition, DIBCO-based pretraining improves binarization performance without increasing model memory consumption, requiring only about 1.5 additional training hours. Experiments on DIBCO-style benchmarks show that ERN-Net is effective under low-data and low-memory settings.

Hsin-Jui Pan, Sheng-Wei Chan, Jen-Shiung Chiang

Dept. of Electrical Engineering Tamkang University

Binarization Convnext Degradation Reasoning Skills

Jun 8, 2026cs.CV

SpineReport: Automated 3D Quantification and Reporting of Lumbar Spine Degeneration on MRI

Lumbar spine conditions are a leading cause of disability worldwide, yet reliable quantification of degeneration from MRI remains challenging. In clinical practice, analysis is predominantly performed in two dimensions (2D), as manual three-dimensional (3D) assessment is time-consuming. However, 2D measurements suffer from limited reproducibility, particularly when anatomical structures are not aligned with the imaging plane. Existing automated approaches are often restricted to 2D, rely on discrete grading, or lack robustness and interpretability. We introduce SpineReport, an open-source, fully automated framework for comprehensive 3D morphometric analysis of lumbar spine MRI. Leveraging robust anatomical segmentations, the method extracts quantitative metrics from key structures, including the spinal canal, spinal cord, vertebrae, intervertebral discs, and foramina. These include both morphological and signal-based features, enabling cross-subject and longitudinal assessment. SpineReport further generates subject-specific reports that allow comparison with cohort distributions, improving interpretability and objective characterization of spinal morphology. Clinical relevance was evaluated against radiologist-reported severity grades for central canal, lateral recess, and foraminal stenosis. Metrics showed strong associations with central canal stenosis severity, with T2-weighted CSF signal providing the highest performance (AUC = 0.95). Canal AP diameter and area ratios also demonstrated strong correlations and high discriminative ability (AUC > 0.80). For lateral recess stenosis, associations were moderate, with lateral CSF signal being the most informative (AUC = 0.73). No significant associations were observed for foraminal stenosis despite robust region-of-interest extraction. SpineReport is released as an open-access tool: https://ivadomed.github.io/SpineReport/

Nathan Molinier, Adrian A. Marth, Reto Sutter +6

1NeuroPoly, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Polytechnique Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada · 2Mila, Quebec AI Institute, Montreal, QC, Canada · Department of Radiology, Balgrist University Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland +7

Morphometric Analysis Multi Organ Computed Tomography Segmentation Magnetic Resonance Imaging Degradation

Jun 3, 2026cs.AI

Uncertainty Aware Functional Behavior Prediction and Material Fatigue Assessment for Circular Factory

Returned products in circular factories re-enter production with heterogeneous degradation states, usage histories, and remaining capability. Reuse cannot be decided from the current inspection alone, because future function fulfillment and component integrity may evolve differently under the next service scenario. Existing PHM approaches support degradation prediction, but often target fixed operating conditions or isolated component benchmarks, while material-fatigue assessment is rarely linked to system-level functional prognosis. This paper addresses this gap for an angle grinder by combining uncertainty-aware functional prediction with component-level fatigue assessment in an instance-specific reliability workflow. The proposed framework combines the current tool state with recent force--torque usage windows. A convolutional encoder extracts loading patterns from spindle forces and shaft torque, and an LSTM backbone predicts nine functional variables as Gaussian mean and variance estimates. In parallel, the same loading history is translated into output-shaft fatigue information through finite-element-supported stress reconstruction, S--N/Miner damage evaluation with Haibach extension, and Paris-law crack-growth analysis. A streaming replay algorithm consolidates both branches into functional, material, and system reliability trajectories. Held-out tests show mean

2\%

-tolerance accuracy of 0.9652 across nine outputs. Thermal variables are predicted near-perfectly, while drive motor current and load speed remain the most demanding dynamic outputs, with

R^2

values of 0.9750 and 0.9924. Torque history is especially important for these variables, and the conventional LSTM outperforms GRU and xLSTM in the short-history setting. Reliability calibration is most informative for drive motor current, where predicted and observed exceedance probabilities ...

Nehal Afifi, Mehdi Khabou, Victor Mas +5

Prognostics Degradation Uncertainty

Jun 1, 2026cs.AI

Physically-Constrained Mamba-SDE for Remaining Useful Life Prediction under Irregular Observations

Accurate Remaining Useful Life prediction is critical for industrial predictive maintenance. However, real-world deployment is challenging due to the irregular nature of sensor observations, characterized by asynchronous sampling, burst missingness, and temporal jitter. Compounding this issue, purely data-driven models often generate physically implausible degradation trajectories that violate the irreversible nature of damage accumulation. To address this, we propose PC-MambaSDE, a unified continuous-time framework for robust RUL prediction under irregular observations. Specifically, we design a Mask-Aware Continuous Mamba Encoder that explicitly leverages observation masks to extract context-rich control signals. Furthermore, we introduce a Physics-Guided Latent SDE with parametrically rectified hybrid drift, superimposing a global physical bias to enforce monotonic degradation even amid severe observation gaps. Additionally, we formulate RUL prediction as a boundary value problem via a Terminal Degradation Penalty, which decouples a Health Index dimension and applies a penalty loss to guide trajectories toward the failure state. Theoretically, we prove that our variational objective is mathematically equivalent to minimizing the KL divergence via Girsanov's theorem, and we guarantee the global asymptotic stability of the learned dynamics through Lyapunov analysis. To enable rigorous evaluation, we develop a Hybrid Irregularity Generation Scheme that simulates realistic industrial imperfections. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that PC-MambaSDE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly under extreme observation scarcity, validating the efficacy of embedding physical priors into continuous-time latent dynamics.

Deyu Zhuang, Peiliang Gong, Yang Shao +4

Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Nanjing, China · Nanyang Technological University Singapore · Singapore University of Technology and Design Singapore

Useful Life Prediction Predictive Maintenance Latent Dynamics Degradation Readmission Prediction Physics-Guided Machine Learning+2

May 30, 2026cs.CV

Real-Time Physics Simulation with Dynamic Mesh-Gaussian Reconstructions

Integrating dynamic 3D reconstructions into physics simulation requires fixed mesh topology for efficient collision detection, but state-of-the-art methods like DG-Mesh produce varying topology optimized for geometric quality. We investigate whether topology conversion can enable physics integration while preserving reconstruction fidelity. We propose a dual-representation framework combining fixed-topology meshes for physics with Gaussian splatting for rendering, achieving 4.65

\times

speedup over varying-topology baselines through runtime vertex buffer updates. We evaluate two conversion strategies, temporal correspondence tracking and template-based projection, against native fixed-topology methods (MaGS) on the DG-Mesh dataset. Our evaluation reveals that both conversion approaches incur 65-80% geometric degradation, producing results inferior to MaGS despite DG-Mesh's superior initial quality. This demonstrates that high-quality reconstruction and physics-compatible topology represent fundamentally distinct objectives that cannot be reconciled through post-processing. Our findings inform future development of physics-aware reconstruction methods and our framework enables real-time simulation with any fixed-topology approach.

Adrian Ramlal, John S. Zelek

University of Waterloo

Physics Simulation Topology Collision Prediction Degradation

May 29, 2026cs.AI

Diagnosing Failure Modes of Shared-State Collaboration in Resource-Constrained Visual Agents

Modular visual reasoning systems increasingly rely on shared working memory for multi-step collaboration, yet the failure dynamics of intermediate state evolution in low-capacity regimes remain underexplored. We study failure modes of collaborative reasoning with weak learners (4B--8B models) through the lens of noise accumulation. We introduce CoSee, an auditing framework that formalizes the read-write-verify loop to trace information flow in document visual question answering. Across multi-page, chart, and web-based benchmarks, we find a counter-intuitive degradation: naive shared workspaces often amplify hallucinations rather than resolve them. We identify two dominant failure modes: Noise Reinforcement, where ungrounded notes are reused as evidence, and Policy Collapse, where added context shifts the model toward under-specified, short-form answers. Using cost-accuracy Pareto frontiers, we show that increased compute can correlate negatively with performance without explicit verification. Our findings suggest that for resource-constrained agents, the bottleneck lies not in reasoning depth but in communication fidelity, providing trace-level diagnostics and a mechanistic baseline for reliable modular design.

Yunpeng Zhou

Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, China

Collaboration Latent Failure Patterns Multi-Agent Reasoning Visual Reasoning Perception Gap Degradation

May 29, 2026cs.LG

How well does Classification Accuracy capture Concept Drift Detection Quality? An overview of Concept Drift Detection evaluation

Data streams are nowadays among the most frequently analyzed data structures, with the concept drift posing a major challenge encountered by processing systems. Despite the proposition of numerous solutions to counteract the accuracy degeneration due to concept drift, the scientific community has not yet established a unified framework for evaluating the concept drift detection task. Existing research often relies on classification quality metrics, but these can be affected by multiple factors and may not reliably reflect drift detection quality. In this work, we present an in-depth overview of the relationship between metrics for quantifying drift detection quality and classification performance in synthetic nonstationary data streams. The proposed research studies eight drift detection quality metrics in relation to the classifier's performance across seven synthetic data stream generation tools, additionally considering drift dynamics as a factor. The studies aim to identify the most informative set of drift detection quality metrics and provide a deep understanding of the method's evaluation.

Joanna Komorniczak

Department of Systems and Computer Networks, Wrocław University of Science and Technology

Detection Performance Non-Stationarity Degradation

May 29, 2026cs.RO

TARIC: Memory-Augmented Traversability-Aware Outdoor VLN under Interrupted Semantic Cues

Outdoor vision-language navigation (VLN) in long-range, open-world environments is frequently disrupted by semantic-cue interruptions, where informative goal cues become sparse, occluded, or leave the field of view. Once such cues disappear, agents enter a cue-free phase and often degrade into backtracking, oscillatory headings, or aimless exploration. While memory-based methods attempt to bridge these gaps, they often fail under traversability-driven detours: the remembered cue direction may be infeasible, forcing detours that prolong cue-free phases and gradually render robot-centric cues stale and implicit histories blurred. This makes traversability a stability condition for maintaining goal-directed guidance, rather than merely a local safety concern. We propose a unified outdoor VLN framework that survives semantic-cue interruptions by maintaining traversability-consistent executable guidance throughout prolonged cue-free phases. Specifically, our method extracts semantic bearings from visibility-gated goal or exploration cues and grounds them into executable headings using a real-time near-field traversability profile, providing goal-consistent feasible guidance beyond reject-only safety filtering. To prevent guidance degradation during detours, we lift intermittent 2D evidence into a world-aligned 3D cue memory with an uncertainty-aware readout mechanism, ensuring guidance remains continuously reachable and stable as the robot moves. We evaluate the framework on quadrupedal and wheeled platforms over 600--1000 m routes. Our method improves simulation success rate by over 10 percentage points over the strongest baseline and achieves a real-world success rate of 40%, compared to 17.5% for the strongest baseline, with substantially higher robustness during prolonged cue-free intervals.

Tianle Zeng, Hanjing Ye, Jianwei Peng +3

Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Robotics and Computer Vision, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. · CKS Robotics Institute, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China. · College of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Hunan, China.

Vision-Language Navigation Exploration Degradation

May 29, 2026cs.AI

Learning Agent-Compatible Context Management for Long-Horizon Tasks

LLM agents increasingly face long-horizon tasks such as web search and deep research in real-world applications, where accumulated context can cause long-context degradation and reasoning failures. Prior work mitigates this through context management with agent-side context control or fixed strategies such as summarization, which require training the agent itself for adaptation - making it impractical for closed-source agents and ignoring that different agents may require different strategies. We introduce Adaptive Context Management (AdaCoM), which trains an external LLM to manage the context of a frozen agent through flexible modification actions and end-to-end reinforcement learning. Across diverse agents on web search and deep research benchmarks, AdaCoM substantially improves performance by preserving task constraints and progress while pruning stale content. The learned strategies reveal a Fidelity-Reliability Trade-off: agents with higher vanilla ReAct performance benefit from higher-fidelity context preservation, whereas lower-performing agents require more aggressive compression to stay within a reliable reasoning regime. Transfer experiments show that AdaCoM generalizes most effectively across agents with similar capability (measured by vanilla ReAct performance), suggesting a practical path toward reusable context managers for agent systems.

Lu Yi, Runlin Lei, Liuyi Yao +6

1Renmin University of China · Work done during internship at Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group · 2Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group +2

Large Language Model Agents Long-Horizon Task Planning Offline Reinforcement Learning Degradation

May 26, 2026cs.AI

BatteryMFormer: Multi-level Learning for Battery Degradation Trajectory Forecasting

Early battery degradation trajectory forecasting (BDTF), which predicts the full-life state-of-health trajectory from early operational data, is critical for battery optimization, manufacturing, and deployment. Battery degradation data exhibit two key characteristics. First, degradation data present a multi-level structure, including regularities shared within aging conditions and trajectory patterns shared across batteries. Second, degradation-related variations in voltage-current profiles are often localized to specific state of charge (SOC) intervals. Existing approaches often fail to explicitly model these characteristics. To bridge this gap, we propose BatteryMFormer, a multi-level Transformer for early BDTF. BatteryMFormer integrates (1) an aging-condition-aware decoder that injects aging-condition priors via aging-condition-informed queries and aging-condition-aware attention, (2) a meta degradation pattern memory that learns and retrieves trajectory prototypes to guide long-horizon forecasting, and (3) a dual-view encoder that jointly captures temporal dynamics and SOC-localized variations from voltage and current time series. Extensive experiments on four battery domains show that BatteryMFormer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, marking a significant step toward reliable BDTF. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ruifeng-Tan/BatteryMFormer.

Ruifeng Tan, Jintao Dong, Weixiang Hong +3

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University · Material Genome Institute, Shanghai University

Lithium-Ion Batteries Forecasting Backbone Degradation

May 23, 2026cs.CV

Self-supervised Dynamic Heterogeneous Degradation Modeling for Unified Zero-Shot Image Restoration

Zero-shot image restoration provides a flexible way to handle diverse degradations without task-specific training. However, existing methods typically rely on stacked layers or pre-trained features to enhance degradation expression, while overlooking physically consistent priors. The insufficient degradation prompts impose the heavy training burden and high sampling costs during zero-shot diffusion. Moreover, the fixed inference trajectory often collapses to suboptimal solutions under complex corruptions. We observe that heterogeneous degradations can be reparameterized into a minimal set of physically coherent parameters for compact representation. Based on this insight, we first propose a unified physical zero-shot image restoration (UP-ZeroIR) framework that explicitly models heterogeneous degradations into a homogeneous all-in-one distribution. The distribution can be optimized directly in the latent space, enabling principled solution exploration and effective prompt adaptation. Besides, we introduce a dynamic quality-refinement strategy that adaptively adjusts the diffusion trajectory for robust globally optimal convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across both single and mixed degradations. Our code is available at https://github.com/yangjinglyy/UP-ZeroIR

XiaoWan Hu, Jing Yang, HeNan Liu +2

Beihang University · Tsinghua University

Image Restoration Degradation Zero-Shot Self-Supervised Learning Motion Coherence

May 20, 2026cs.RO

Lost in Fog: Sensor Perturbations Expose Reasoning Fragility in Driving VLAs

Interpretable autonomous driving planners depend not only on generating explanations, but also on those explanations remaining reliable under real-world sensor degradation. In this paper we present a controlled perturbation study of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) robustness in autonomous driving, evaluating Alpamayo R1 (10B parameters) across 1,996 scenarios under eight sensor perturbations (Gaussian noise at four intensities, two lighting extremes, and two fog levels;

{\sim}18{,}000

inference trials). We find that reasoning consistency is a high-fidelity indicator of trajectory reliability: when Chain-of-Causation (CoC) explanations change after perturbation, trajectory deviation spikes

5.3{\times}

(21.8m vs 4.1m), with

r\!=\!0.99

across attack types and

r_{pb}\!=\!0.53

per-sample (Cohen's

d\!=\!1.12

). A controlled ablation provides evidence that enabling CoC generation is associated with improved trajectory accuracy (11.8% on average across conditions;

p < 0.0001

) under matched inference settings. Over the tested noise range (

σ\in \{10, 30, 50, 70\}

), degradation is approximately linear (

R^2\!=\!0.957

), while standard input preprocessing defenses provide only marginal relief. Together, these results establish CoC consistency as a quantitative proxy for planning safety and motivate reasoning-based runtime monitoring for safer VLA deployment.

Abhinaw Priyadershi, Jelena Frtunikj

NVIDIA Corporation, USA · NVIDIA GmbH, Germany

Fog Degradation

May 19, 2026stat.AP

Understanding Deterioration Random Effects for Causal Discovery in Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure deterioration poses significant challenges for asset management, yet existing approaches rely on population-averaged models that overlook equipment-specific heterogeneity. We present a novel framework that combines Bayesian hierarchical hazard modeling with causal discovery to identify operational patterns that drive heterogeneous deterioration rates in pump equipment. Our approach first estimates pump-specific random effects

u_i

using GPU-accelerated No-U-Turn Sampling (NUTS), achieving 3--5

\times

speedup over CPU implementations. We then employ DirectLiNGAM to discover causal relationships between 22 engineered time-series features and deterioration rates, stratified by positive (

u_i > 0

, faster deterioration) versus negative (

u_i \leq 0

, slower deterioration) random effects. Analyzing 112 pumps with 92,861 observations over 650 days, we uncover striking heterogeneity: the negative group exhibits causal effects 400

\times

larger than the positive group, with standard deviation (std) showing a strong positive causal effect (

+1.515

) on deterioration rates in low-risk equipment. We validate linearity assumptions through NonlinearLiNGAM comparison and demonstrate practical scalability through GPU acceleration. Our findings enable targeted maintenance strategies by revealing that different operational regimes require fundamentally distinct management approaches, advancing predictive maintenance from population-averaged to heterogeneity-aware decision making.

Takato Yasuno

Predictive Maintenance Degradation Time-To-Event Data Generalized Linear Model Heterogeneity Infrastructure+1

May 19, 2026cs.CV

Bézier Degradation Modeling for LiDAR-based Human Motion Capture

LiDAR-based 3D human motion capture has broad applications in fields such as autonomous driving and robotics, where accurate motion reconstruction is crucial. However, existing methods often struggle with unstable inputs and severe occlusions, leading to jittery or even failed pose predictions. To address these challenges, we propose BMLiCap, a coarse-to-fine framework that models motion using temporally compressible Bézier curves. By reducing control points through a trajectory-preserving strategy, we obtain a coherent and learning-friendly motion representation. To reconstruct human actions from LiDAR point-cloud cues, we design a progressive motion-reconstruction module. Specifically, a Time-scale Motion Transformer (TMT) is introduced to predict motion curves at multiple temporal scales, and a Multi-level Motion Aggregator (MMA) is utilized to adaptively fuse the multi-scale curves to recover detailed, temporally coherent poses, effectively bridging observation gaps caused by occlusions and noise. Across four mainstream benchmarks LiDARHuman26M, FreeMotion, NoiseMotion, and SLOPER4D, BMLiCap achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and temporal continuity in complex scenes, demonstrating its ability to compensate for severe occlusions and reduce prediction jitter.

Xiaoqi An, Lin Zhao, Jun Li +2

PCA Lab, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology · PCA Lab, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University

Motion Capture Structure-From-Motion Point Clouds Motion Curves Degradation

May 18, 2026cs.AI

LAST-RAG: Literature-Anchored Stochastic Trajectory Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Conditioned Degradation Model Selection

Stochastic-process-based degradation modeling is a core approach for estimating the distribution of remaining useful life (RUL); however, the selection of an appropriate stochastic process has not been sufficiently addressed. Existing model selection methods mainly rely on the statistical fit of the observed health indicator (HI) trajectory, but this approach may select a model that is inconsistent with the underlying degradation mechanism when the observation window is short or the signal is highly noisy. To address this issue, this paper proposes Literature-Anchored Stochastic Trajectory Retrieval-Augmented Generation (LAST-RAG). The proposed method uses both the observed HI trajectory and domain-specific context, and hierarchically conditions the candidate degradation model space based on theoretical and mechanical evidence retrieved from a local evidence bank. In addition, Rule-based Confidence Reasoning with Uncertain State (RCRUS) is introduced to prevent candidate models from being prematurely eliminated when hierarchical decisions are uncertain. Simulation-based experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms statistical, prognostic, and uncertainty-aware baselines in both Wiener/gamma family classification and detailed degradation model classification. Ultimately, this study reframes degradation model selection from a purely statistical goodness-of-fit problem into a knowledge-conditioned decision-making problem that integrates observed data with domain knowledge.

Hanbyeol Park, Hyerim Bae

Department of Industrial Engineering · Pusan National University · Busan, Republic of Korea

Degradation Model Selection

May 17, 2026cs.CV

Degradation Frequency Curve: An Explicit Frequency-Quantified Representation for All-in-One Image Restoration

A fundamental difficulty in all-in-one blind image restoration is that degradation is usually treated as an implicit factor hidden in degraded-to-clean mapping, rather than as an explicit object that can be measured and manipulated. This limitation becomes more pronounced under mixed, compound, or unseen degradation conditions, where degradation effects are hard to assign to predefined labels or task-specific parameters. We propose the Degradation Frequency Curve (DFC), a structured spectral representation that quantifies degradation responses by measuring band-wise residual-to-degraded energy ratios in the frequency domain. DFC converts visually entangled and hard-to-describe degradation effects into a measurable degradation coordinate space. Moreover, DFC can be adaptively decomposed into band-wise spectral tokens, allowing local degradation responses to be represented as reusable restoration priors. Based on this representation, we develop the DFC-guided Image Restorer (DFC-IR), a token-conditioned multi-scale framework that progressively estimates DFCs from intermediate restorations and uses the resulting spectral tokens to guide degradation-aware restoration in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments on standard, composite, unseen, and real-world degradation benchmarks show that DFC provides an effective representation basis for all-in-one restoration, leading to state-of-the-art performance and improved generalization under complex degradation profiles.

Xinghua Huang, Zhixiong Yang, Chen Wu +6

College of Electronic Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China · College of Electronic Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China · VCIP, School of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China

Image Restoration Degradation Signal Reconstruction

May 17, 2026cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Causal Anomaly Detection for Lithium-Ion Battery Degradation

Reliable early detection of lithium-ion battery degradation requires health indicators that are physically interpretable and computable from routine cycler telemetry without access to the degradation region. We introduce \textsc{CausalHealth}, a framework that applies causal graph discovery and

k

-nearest-neighbour transfer entropy to per-cycle voltage, current, temperature, and resistance time series, and organises twelve resulting anomaly scores into three signal-class bundles (Magnitude-shift, Predictive-residual, Complexity-entropy) -- with Isolation Forest reported separately as it falls below the bundle reliability threshold -- to characterise detection sensitivity across ten commissioning fractions (5--30,%). The Magnitude-shift class achieves 100,% detection across all seven tested cells spanning LFP (MIT--Stanford MATR) and LCO (NASA PCoE, CALCE CS2) chemistries, with a lead time of up to 402 cycles before conventional capacity-threshold failure on gradual-fade cells. A Reliability-Weighted Master Health Index (RWMHI) -- a cross-bundle fusion of five high-reliability detectors weighted by inverse coefficient of variation -- improves lead time by 15--52 cycles over the class median on long-lived cells while maintaining 100,% detection. Validation against electrochemical impedance spectroscopy on an NMC prismatic cell provides independent physical grounding: transfer entropy

\mathrm{TE}(R \!\to\! V)

correlates with charge-transfer resistance

R_{\mathrm{ct}}

(pooled

r = +0.990

; temperature-controlled partial

r = +0.898

), and an Arrhenius analysis of both quantities yields an activation energy consistent with published NMC charge-transfer kinetics. These results are evaluated on seven cells across three benchmark datasets.

Dieter W. Heermann, Hagen Heermann

Institute for Theoretical Physics, Heidelberg University, Philosophenweg 19, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany · Intilion GmbH, Wollmarktstraße 115c, D-33098 Paderborn, Germany

Lithium-Ion Batteries Interpretable Anomaly Detection Degradation Multivariate Telemetry Data Causal Graph

May 16, 2026cs.CV

Expandable, Compressible, Mineable: Open-World Thermal Image Restoration

In open-world settings, thermal infrared (TIR) image degradations continuously emerge and evolve, while most existing all-in-one restoration methods are built on a closed-set assumption and struggle to continually adapt to novel degradations. To address this, we propose ECMRNet, an Expandable, Compressible, and Mineable Restoration Network for open-world TIR restoration from a continual learning perspective. Conceptually, ECMRNet unifies continual degradation learning as an "expand-compress-mine" closed-loop process, enabling sustained adaptation to new degradations with controllable evolution. Structurally, ECMRNet decomposes intermediate representations into group-isolated subspaces, and achieves strict parameter isolation and fast adaptation to new degradations by freezing historical groups and isomorphically expanding new ones. To curb model growth as tasks accumulate, we present Structural Entropy Pruning, which identifies and removes redundant channel groups via two-dimensional structural entropy minimization, achieving information contribution-driven adaptive compression. Moreover, we design a Sub-degradation Knowledge Mining Module that dynamically retrieves and recombines transferable components from historical representations to improve restoration under compound degradations. Experimental results demonstrate that ECMRNet achieves superior overall performance across diverse single and compound degradations while using fewer parameters and lower computational cost. The source code is available at https://github.com/Kust-lp/ECMRNet.

Pu Li, Huafeng Li, Yafei Zhang +3

Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Yunnan, China · School of Mathematics and Statistics, Yunnan University, Yunnan, China · Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Visual Object Detection and Recognition, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China

Restoration Degradation Rapid Adaptation

May 15, 2026cs.CV

A Causally Grounded Taxonomy for Image Degradation Robustness Evaluation

Image degradations can occur during acquisition, processing, and transmission, altering visual appearance and affecting downstream vision tasks. They are studied in several communities, including synthetic corruption benchmarks for robustness evaluation, perceptual image quality assessment, and physically grounded analyses of imaging systems or real camera failures. Although these areas address closely related phenomena, they often use incompatible grouping schemes and backend specific severity definitions, making results difficult to compare across datasets, degradation sources, and tasks. We propose a causally grounded framework for organizing and interpreting image degradations across these settings. Instead of introducing new degradations or redefining existing benchmarks, we provide an interpretive representation and measurement layer that makes implicit assumptions explicit. Each degradation is described along two orthogonal axes: its dominant causal source in the imaging pipeline (environment, sensor/optics, ISP/renderer/codec, or transfer/system), and its resulting perceptual effect. This dual axis abstraction yields a compact taxonomy spanning algorithmic corruptions, perceptual distortions, and physically motivated imaging artifacts. To address inconsistent severity semantics without changing existing implementations, we introduce a lightweight severity measurement layer. For every degradation and each native severity level of a given backend, we quantify degradation strength using full reference image quality metrics: PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS. This makes severity observable and comparable across sources while preserving native parameterizations. We demonstrate the framework through COCO Degradation, a taxonomy aligned benchmark for evaluating object detector robustness under diverse imaging conditions.

Stefan Becker, Simon Weiss, Wolfgang Hübner +1

Fraunhofer IOSB Ettlingen, Germany

Visual Degradation Degradation Image Quality Assessment Severity Taxonomy

May 13, 2026cs.LG

Understanding Generalization through Decision Pattern Shift

Understanding why deep neural networks (DNNs) fail to generalize to unseen samples remains a long-standing challenge. Existing studies mainly examine changes in externally observable factors such as data, representations, or outputs, yet offer limited insight into how a model's internal decision mechanism evolves from training to test. To address this gap, we introduce Decision Pattern Shift (DPS), a new perspective that defines generalization through the stability of internal decision patterns and quantifies failure as their deviation from those learned during training. Specifically, we represent each sample's decision pattern as a GradCAM-based channel-contribution vector, which captures how feature channels collectively support a prediction, and we propose the DPS metric to measure its discrepancy from the class-average pattern. Empirical analyses across multiple datasets and architectures show that, (i) decision patterns form a highly structured, class-consistent space with strong intra-class cohesion and low inter-class confusion, enabling direct analysis of a model's decision logic; (ii) the DPS magnitude correlates linearly with the generalization gap (nearly all Pearson r > 0.8), revealing generalization as a systematic drift in the model's internal decision mechanism; (iii) the DPS spectrum organizes diverse generalization degradation scenarios (covering ideal generalization, in-distribution degradation, domain shift, out-of-distribution, and shortcut learning) into a continuous trajectory, providing a unified explanation of their failure modes. These findings open up new possibilities for early generalization-risk detection, failure-mode diagnosis, and channel-level defect localization.

Huiqi Deng, Yibo Li, Quanshi Zhang +3

Xi’an Jiaotong University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Improved Generalization Intra-Class Degradation Defect Detection Decisions

May 13, 2026cs.CR

Quantifying LLM Safety Degradation Under Repeated Attacks Using Survival Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in a wide range of applications, yet remain vulnerable to adversarial jailbreak attacks that circumvent their safety guardrails. Existing evaluation frameworks typically report binary success/failure metrics, failing to capture the temporal dynamics of how attacks succeed under persistent adversarial pressure. This preliminary work proposes a novel evaluation framework that applies survival analysis techniques to characterize LLM jailbreak vuln`erability. Our approach models the time-to-jailbreak as a survival outcome, enabling estimation of hazard functions, survival curves, and risk factors associated with successful attacks. We evaluate three LLMs against a subset of prompts from the HarmBench dataset spanning three attack categories. Our analysis reveals that models exhibit distinct vulnerability profiles: while one model demonstrates rapid degradation under iterative attacks, the two other models show consistent moderate vulnerability. Our framework provides actionable insights for model and LLM application developers and establishes survival analysis as a rigorous methodology for LLM safety evaluation.

Zvi Topol

MuyVentive, LLC

Large Language Model Jailbreaks Large Language Model Safety Jailbreak Attacks Survival Analysis Degradation

May 12, 2026cs.AI

Classifier Context Rot: Monitor Performance Degrades with Context Length

Monitoring coding agents for dangerous behavior using language models requires classifying transcripts that often exceed 500K tokens, but prior agent monitoring benchmarks rarely contain transcripts longer than 100K tokens. We show that when used as classifiers, current frontier models fail to notice dangerous actions more often in longer transcripts. In particular, on a dataset that requires identifying when a coding agent takes a subtly dangerous action, Opus 4.6, GPT 5.4, and Gemini 3.1 miss these actions

2\times

to

30\times

more often when they occur after 800K tokens of benign activity than when they occur on their own. We also show that these weaknesses can be partially mitigated with prompting techniques such as periodic reminders throughout the transcript and may be mitigated further with better post-training. Monitor evaluations that do not consider long-context degradation are likely overestimating monitor performance.

Sam Martin, Fabien Roger

Anthropic Fellows Program · Anthropic

Context Length Agentic Benchmarks Transcription Degradation

May 12, 2026cs.CV

UniFixer: A Universal Reference-Guided Fixer for Diffusion-Based View Synthesis

With the recent surge of generative models, diffusion-based approaches have become mainstream for view synthesis tasks, either in an explicit depth-warp-inpaint or in an implicit end-to-end manner. Despite their success, both paradigms often suffer from noticeable quality degradation, e.g., blurred details and distorted structures, caused by pixel-to-latent compression and diffusion hallucination. In this paper, we investigate diffusion degradation from three key dimensions (i.e., spatial, temporal, and backbone-related) and propose UniFixer, a universal reference-guided framework that fixes diverse degradation artifacts via a coarse-to-fine strategy. Specifically, a reference pre-alignment module is first designed to perform coarse alignment between the reference view and the degraded novel view. A global structure anchoring mechanism then rectifies geometric distortions to ensure structural fidelity, followed by a local detail injection module that recovers fine-grained texture details for high-quality view synthesis. Our UniFixer serves as a plug-and-play refiner that achieves zero-shot fixing across different types of diffusion degradation, and extensive experiments verify our state-of-the-art performance on novel view synthesis and stereo conversion.

Sihan Chen, Xiang Zhang, Yang Zhang +2

ETH Zürich, Switzerland · DisneyResearch|Studios, Switzerland

Novel View Synthesis Degradation

May 11, 2026q-bio.QM

Beyond Manual Curation: Augmenting Targeted Protein Degradation Databases via Agentic Literature Extraction Workflows

Predictive models in biomedicine depend on structured assay data locked in the text, tables, and supplements of primary publications. This bottleneck is especially acute in targeted protein degradation (TPD), where each assay record must combine compound identity, degradation target, recruiter, assay context, and endpoint values reported across sections, tables, and supplementary files. Inconsistent compound identifiers and incomplete or implicit assay context further demand domain-specific logic that generic LLM pipelines do not provide. Existing molecular glue and PROTAC databases are manually curated and often lack the experimental context required for downstream modeling. We formulate TPD database extraction as a domain-specific curation task and present an expert-in-the-loop LLM workflow, evaluated through a triangular comparison among LLM predictions, standardized baseline records, and expert-annotated ground truth. A lightweight cross-validated prompt-refinement module adapts extraction instructions from scarce expert annotations. With only seven annotated molecular glue publications, the workflow achieved record-level

F_1 = 0.98

and transferred to PROTACs by terminology substitution alone, maintaining record-level

F_1 > 0.93

. Applied at scale, it expanded molecular glue and PROTAC databases by 81% and 92% records, respectively, with 92% and 82.5% of newly recovered records validated as correct upon expert review. The workflow also recovered kinetic and assay-context information essential for cross-study potency comparison and condition-aware degradation modeling. We release the workflow, prompts, evaluation code, and extracted datasets as resources for TPD data curation and AI-assisted scientific curation more broadly.

Yaochen Rao, Farzaneh Jalalypour, N. M. Anoop Krishnan +1

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, SE · Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, IN

Protein Data-Curation Degradation Extraction Large Language Model Pipelines Multimodal Documents

May 11, 2026cs.LG

Benchmarking Sensor-Fault Robustness in Forecasting

Cyber-physical system (CPS) forecasting models depend on sensor streams with noisy, biased, missing, or temporally misaligned readings, yet standard forecasting evaluation often selects models by nominal error without showing whether they remain robust under such faults. We introduce SensorFault-Bench, a shared CPS-grounded sensor-fault stress-test protocol for evaluating forecasting architectures and robustness-improvement methods, and an operational taxonomy organizing the method comparison. Across four real-world datasets and eight scored scenarios governed by a standardized severity model, it reports worst-scenario degradation, clean mean squared error (MSE), and worst-scenario fault-time MSE, separating relative robustness from absolute error. A disjoint fault-transfer split lets explicit fault-training methods train on adjacent fault families while evaluation uses separate benchmark scenarios. Empirically, forecasting architectures favored by clean MSE can degrade sharply under faults, and clean-MSE rankings can disagree with worst-scenario fault-time error rankings. Chronos-2, the evaluated zero-shot foundation-model representative, matches or trails the last-value naive forecaster in clean MSE on the two single-target datasets and has the largest worst-scenario degradation on ETTh1 and Traffic, where all channels are forecast targets. For the evaluated robustness-improvement method set, paired deltas show selective degradation reductions: projected gradient descent adversarial training and randomized training lead where value faults dominate observed degradation, while fault augmentation leads where availability faults dominate. SensorFault-Bench provides open-source code, documented data access, and reproduction and extension guides, so new datasets, architectures, and robustness-improvement methods can be evaluated under the same CPS sensor-fault robustness protocol.

Alexander Windmann, Philipp Wittenberg, Gianluca Manca +3

1Helmut Schmidt University · 2Ruhr University Bochum · 3ABB Corporate Research +2

Forecasting Backbone Fault Diagnosis Cyber-Physical System Degradation

May 11, 2026cs.LG

Elucidating Representation Degradation Problem in Diffusion Model Training

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success, yet their training remains inefficient due to a severe optimization bottleneck, which we term Representation Degradation. As noise levels increase, the outputs of the trained model exhibit progressive structural distortion, which can destabilize training and impair generation quality. Our analysis suggests that this instability is driven by mismatched target recoverability, which is associated with Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) spectral weakening and effective low-rank behavior. To address this, we propose Elucidated Representation Diffusion (ERD), a plug-and-play framework that dynamically reallocates optimization effort according to effective recoverability. By stabilizing representation learning without external supervision, ERD accelerates convergence and achieves strong empirical performance across diffusion backbones.

Zhipeng Yao, Dazhou Li, Zitong Zhang +6

University of Louisville · Shenyang University of Chemical Technology · Florida International University +2

Diffusion Models Degradation Low-Rank Structure

May 11, 2026cs.CL

The Association of Transformer-based Sentiment Analysis with Symptom Distress and Deterioration in Routine Psychotherapy Care

Sentiment analysis has been of long-standing interest in psychotherapy research. Recently, the Transformer deep learning architecture has produced text-based sentiment analysis models that are highly accurate and context-aware. These models have been explored as proxies for emotion measurement instruments in psychotherapy, but not investigated as stand-alone psychometric tools. Using proposed utterance-level and session-level sentiment features derived from a fine-grained sentiment model on a large corpus of psychotherapy sessions (N = 751), we investigate the distribution of session aggregated sentiment scores. Further, we characterize the relationship of these features to individual components and the overall score of the OQ-45 instrument and find that this sentiment feature is most strongly correlated to components related to emotional valence in directionally intuitive ways. Finally, we report that there are statistically significant differences between the sentiment distributions for patients flagged as at risk of deterioration or dropping out of care via either the OQ Rational or Empirical outcome models. These correlations to a fully-validated psychometric instrument demonstrate that these proposed sentiment features are, at least, adjunctive measures of client distress and deterioration.

Douglas K. Faust, Peter Awad, Alexandre Vaz +1

Sentio University, Torrance, CA, USA · Western Washington University, Department of Mathematics, Bellingham, WA, USA

Depression Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Sentiment Distress Transformer Architectures Degradation+1

May 10, 2026cs.CV

DegBins: Degradation-Driven Binning for Depth Super-Resolution

Depth super-resolution (DSR) aims to recover a high-resolution (HR) depth map from its low-resolution (LR) counterpart. With color image guidance, this task is typically formulated as learning the residual between HR and LR in a low-dimensional feature space. However, this additive formulation is insufficient to accurately capture the complex relationship between HR and LR, especially under spatially varying degradations. In this paper, we introduce DegBins, a novel DSR framework that leverages degradation-driven binning to adaptively enhance residual modeling. Specifically, DegBins reformulates the regression-based DSR as a hybrid classification-regression problem, where the residual depth is represented as a linear combination of discrete depth bins weighted by their learned probability distribution, yielding more flexible and expressive representations. Furthermore, DegBins models the degradation relationship between HR and LR in a high-dimensional feature space, enabling adaptive bin range adjustment and probability optimization conditioned on local degradation characteristics. To progressively improve reconstruction quality, DegBins adopts a multi-stage refinement scheme, where each stage performs finer-grained bin partitioning and probability updating based on the former estimation. This coarse-to-fine design facilitates more accurate depth recovery, particularly in regions with severe degradations or complex structural variations. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that DegBins consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, robustness, and generalization.

Zhiqiang Yan, Zhengxue Wang, Jian Yang +1

Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore · Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Generative Super-Resolution Query-Specific Degradation-Aware Representation Residual Conditional Diffusion Model Degradation

May 8, 2026cs.CL

Quality-Conditioned Agreement in Automated Short Answer Scoring: Mid-Range Degradation and the Impact of Task-Specific Adaptation

Automated short answer scoring (ASAS) is shifting from discriminative, fine-tuned models to large language models (LLMs) used in few-shot settings. This paradigm leverages LLMs broad world knowledge and ease of deployment, but limited task-specific data may reduce alignment on complex scoring tasks. In particular, its impact on scoring partially correct responses that require nuanced interpretation remains underexplored. We investigate the relationship between the degree of task-specific adaptation of different models and quality-conditioned scoring agreement. We compare three LLMs (GPT-5.2, GPT-4o, Claude Opus 4.5) in few-shot mode, a fine-tuned BERT-based encoder, and a human expert on two open-ended biology items, using several hundred student responses and ground truth scores provided by a biology education expert. The results show that human-human agreement is highest and stable across the full quality spectrum. All AI models perform well on fully correct and fully incorrect responses, but exhibit substantial degradation on mid-range responses. This mid-range degradation is conditioned on task-specific adaptation: It is most severe in few-shot LLMs with few examples and decreases as task-specific data increases, with fine-tuned encoder models performing best. This mid-range degradation may lead to inequitable evaluation of responses produced by students with developing understanding. Our findings highlight the importance of quality-conditioned fairness, with particular attention to mid-range responses.

Abigail Victoria Gurin Schleifer, Moriah Ariely, Beata Beigman Klebanov +2

Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel · ETS, Princeton, USA

Agreement Degradation

May 8, 2026cs.CV

How Far Is Document Parsing from Solved? PureDocBench: A Source-Traceable Benchmark across Clean, Degraded, and Real-World Settings

Document parsing models are improving rapidly, but existing benchmarks are still insufficient for a comprehensive evaluation of their capabilities. We introduce PureDocBench, a benchmark with 10 domains, 66 subcategories, and 1,475 pages. Each page has matched Clean, Digital, and Real versions, covering clean renders, simulated degradation, and real capture or sharing conditions. The resulting 4,425 images have source-derived annotations for text, formulas, tables, and reading order, checked through automated validation and human review. Keeping page content and annotations fixed allows direct comparisons across image conditions. We evaluate 58 models, including pipeline-based parsers, end-to-end parsers, and general vision-language models. The best three-track average score is 79.69 out of 100, and the mean across models is 63.84. Scores drop by 3.34 points on Digital and 11.61 points on Real on average, relative to Clean. TeleOCR leads on Clean, GLM-5.3-Flash on Digital, and Gemini 3.6 Flash on Real. The benchmark dataset, source documents, generation tools, and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/zhihengli-casia/PureDocBench.

Zhiheng Li, Zongyang Ma, Jiaxian Chen +12

CASIA · UCAS · Beijing Key Laboratory of Super Intelligent Security of Multi-Modal Information +6

Document Parsing Multi-Image Editing Benchmarks Model Auditing Degradation Real-World

May 7, 2026cs.CV

Continuous Expert Assembly: Instance-Conditioned Low-Rank Residuals for All-in-One Image Restoration

Real-world image degradation is often unknown, spatially non-uniform, and compositional, requiring all-in-one restoration models to adapt a single set of weights to diverse local corruption patterns without test-time degradation labels. Existing methods typically modulate a shared backbone with global prompts or degradation descriptors, or route features through predefined expert pools. However, compact global conditioning can bottleneck localized degradation evidence, while static expert routing may produce homogeneous updates or rely on unstable sparse assignments. We propose \textbf{Continuous Expert Assembly} (CEA), a token-wise dynamic parameterization framework for all-in-one image restoration. CEA employs a lightweight \textbf{Cross-Attention Hyper-Adapter} to probe intermediate spatial features and synthesize instance-conditioned low-rank routing bases and residual directions. Each spatial token then assembles its own residual update via dense signed dot-product affinities over the generated rank-wise components, avoiding external prompts, static expert banks, and discrete Top- selection. The resulting assembly rule also admits a linear-attention perspective, making its dense token-wise routing behavior transparent. Experiments on AIO-3, AIO-5, and CDD-11 show that CEA improves average restoration quality over strong prompt-, descriptor-, and expert-based baselines, with the clearest gains on spatially varying and compositional degradations, while maintaining favorable parameter, FLOP, and runtime efficiency.

Haisen He, Xiangyu Zou, SongLin Dong +3

Southern University of Science and Technology · Shenzhen University · Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology +1

Image Restoration Restoration Degradation Cross-Attention

May 7, 2026cs.CV

EGA: Adapting Frozen Encoders for Vector Search with Bounded Out-of-Distribution Degradation

Vector search systems built on frozen vision encoders face queries from unseen classes at deployment, yet existing adapter training collapses under this shift: high-capacity adapters with global contrastive losses silently reassign unseen-class samples to wrong seen-class clusters, dropping worst-case Label Precision by over 40 points below the frozen baseline in our tests. We propose Euclidean Geodesic Alignment (EGA), a residual adapter that couples three principles: zero initialization, local triplet loss, and hypersphere projection. These collectively induce a self-limiting dynamic: triplets that already satisfy a small margin stop producing gradients, so the adapter automatically stops updating where the local geometry is already correct. Our experiments show that at convergence

96.5\%

of triplets are gradient-free, leaving unseen-class regions largely untouched while still enabling full-capacity refinement of seen classes. Across five diverse out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, EGA achieves the highest worst-case Label Precision on the four primary splits and a consistent improvement on the fifth. The design also transfers to stronger backbones in addition to CLIP, and we provide an analytical justification linking gradient sparsity to bounded OOD perturbation.

Dongfang Zhao

Tacoma School of Engineering and Technology University of Washington

Frozen Encoder Out-Of-Distribution Contrastive Loss Geodesic Degradation

May 6, 2026cs.CV

Safety-Critical Camera Reliability Monitoring for ADAS via Degradation-Aware Uncertainty Pattern Analysis

Reliable camera input is essential for safety-critical ADAS perception, but most monitoring approaches detect sensor failures only after downstream performance has degraded. We propose a proactive camera reliability monitoring framework that estimates perception risk from degradation-induced uncertainty patterns before downstream failure becomes observable. The method introduces a Global Sensor Health Index (GSHI), a continuous reliability score that aggregates per-degradation severities using a risk-aware multiplicative formulation, allowing severe single-mode failures such as lens occlusion or motion blur to dominate the health estimate. A lightweight multi-task network predicts degradation type, severity, GSHI, and spatial uncertainty maps from a single RGB image without downstream task feedback. Training uses physics- and geometry-aware synthetic supervision over twelve camera degradation modes. Experiments on KITTI-derived degradations show that GSHI decreases monotonically with severity, achieves a health-estimation MAE of 0.064, and provides positive early-warning lead time of 0.47

\pm

0.25 severity units before YOLOv8 detection failure. GSHI also outperforms IQA, detector-confidence, and clean-feature OOD baselines, and transfers zero-shot to real adverse-weather driving data. These results support degradation-aware uncertainty analysis as a practical direction for proactive camera reliability monitoring in intelligent vehicles.

Shiva Aher

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.

Degradation Roadside Cameras Autonomous Driving Perception Detection Performance Uncertainty

May 4, 2026cs.MA

Enwar 3.0: An Agentic Multi-Modal LLM Orchestrator for Situation-Aware Beamforming, Blockage Prediction, and Handover Management

Maintaining robust millimeter-wave (mmWave) connectivity in vehicular networks requires real-time adaptation to environmental dynamics, sensor degradation, and link variability. This paper presents Enwar 3.0, an environment-aware reasoning framework that unifies multi-modal sensing, agentic large language models (LLMs), and context-driven model selection for predictive beamforming, blockage detection, and handover management. Building upon prior iterations of Enwar, the proposed architecture integrates a classifier-driven assessment of sensor health with a primed LLM that orchestrates multiple specialized agents through structured, task-aware prompting. A novel synthetic degradation pipeline enables the training of a sensor degradation classifier that detects real-time impairments across camera, radar, LiDAR, and GPS inputs, achieving over 99% accuracy. The LLM, trained via chain-of-thought (CoT) priming and human-in-the-loop feedback, coordinates agent calls for beam selection, blockage forecasting, and environment perception while dynamically loading sensor-specific models based on environmental context. Extensive evaluations across 15 sensor combinations demonstrate that Enwar 3.0 delivers state-of-the-art performance in both predictive accuracy and interpretability, with beam selection accuracy exceeding 88%, blockage F1-scores surpassing 98%, and reasoning correctness reaching 87% on complex decision prompts. This work establishes a scalable foundation for LLM-integrated wireless systems that reason, perceive, and adapt in real-time.

Ahmad M. Nazar, Abdulkadir Celik, Asmaa Abdallah +3

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University (ISU), Ames, IA, 50014, USA · Gladiolus Technological Institute, USA · School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, U.K. +2

Beamforming Millimeter Wave Accurate Traffic Forecasting Handoff Degradation

May 4, 2026cs.CV

MULTITEXTEDIT: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Degradation in Text-in-Image Editing

Text-in-image editing has become a key capability for visual content creation, yet existing benchmarks remain overwhelmingly English-centric and often conflate visual plausibility with semantic correctness. We introduce MULTITEXTEDIT, a controlled benchmark of 3,600 instances spanning 12 typologically diverse languages, 5 visual domains, and 7 editing operations. Language variants of each instance share a common visual base and are paired with a human-edited reference and region masks, isolating the language variable for cross-lingual comparison. To capture script-level errors that coarse text-matching metrics miss, such as missing diacritics, reversed RTL order, and mixed-script renderings, we introduce a language fidelity (LSF) metric scored by a two-stage LVM protocol that first traces the edited target text and then judges it in isolation, reaching a quadratic-weighted \k{appa} of 0.76 against native-speaker annotators. Evaluating 12 open-source and proprietary systems with LSF alongside standard semantic and mask-aware pixel metrics, we find pronounced cross-lingual degradation for every model, largest on Hebrew and Arabic and smallest on Dutch and Spanish, and concentrated in text accuracy and script fidelity rather than in coarse structural dimensions. We also uncover a pervasive semantic and pixel mismatch, where outputs preserve global layout and background fidelity yet distort script-specific forms.

Liwei Cheng, Shibo Feng, Lunjie Zhou +2

1Harbin Institute of Technology

Multilingual Benchmark Cross-Lingual Consistency Multimodal Benchmarks Edit Degradation

May 4, 2026cs.LG

A Novel Preprocessing-Driven Approach to Remaining Useful Life (RUL) Prediction Using Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN)

Accurate prediction of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) in aero-engines is vital for predictive maintenance, improved operational reliability, and reduced lifecycle costs. While deep learning approaches have demonstrated strong potential in this area, most existing methods focus primarily on model architecture design and treat input features uniformly, often neglecting the influence of data preprocessing. In this work, we propose a novel preprocessing pipeline that enhances RUL prediction by improving data quality and temporal representation before model training. Our approach leverages complete temporal sequences and generates RUL estimates at each timestep, enabling the model to capture fine-grained degradation dynamics and deliver continuous prognostic insights throughout the engine's operational life. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed pipeline, we conduct experiments on the NASA C-MAPSS dataset. Comparative evaluations against a suite of state-of-the-art neural models including CNN, RNN, LSTM, DCNN, TCN, BiGRU-TSAM, AGCNN, and ATCN, demonstrate that our approach consistently achieves superior accuracy and robustness in aero-engine RUL prediction. These results highlight the critical role of preprocessing in maximizing the effectiveness of neural prognostic models.

Florent Imbert, Tosin Adewumi, Hui Han

Machine Learning Group · Lulea University of Technology · Lulea, Sweden

Useful Life Prediction Temporal Convolutional Networks Prognostics Preprocessing Degradation

May 2, 2026cs.CV

Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating for Unified Image Restoration

Unified image restoration using a single model often faces task interference due to diverse degradations. To address this, we propose DACG-IR (Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating), which enables explicit perception of degradation characteristics to dynamically modulate feature representations. Our method constructs degradation-aware contextual representations from the input to modulate attention distribution, frequency-domain features, and feature aggregation. Specifically, a lightweight multi-scale degradation-aware module extracts coarse degradation information and generates layer-wise prompts. These prompts guide attention temperature and output gating in encoder and decoder blocks for adaptive feature extraction. Additionally, a spatial-channel dual-gated adaptive fusion mechanism refines encoder features, suppressing noise propagation from shallow to deep layers. This design effectively suppresses degradation-induced noise while preserving informative structures. Experiments show DACG-IR outperforms state-of-the-art methods in single-task, all-in-one, adverse weather removal, and composite degradation settings. Code: https://github.com/HlHomes/DACG-IR-code

Lei He, Jielei Chu, Fengmao Lv +4

Query-Specific Degradation-Aware Representation Image Restoration Degradation Adaptive Feature Fusion

Apr 30, 2026cs.CL

Helpfulness Hurts: Domain-Dependent Degradation of Mid-Trained Compassion Values Under Post-Training

Standard post-training pipelines apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to make language models helpful, but these processes may inadvertently degrade values instilled during pre-training. We investigate whether the domain of post-training data differentially affects the retention of animal compassion values in a Llama 3.1 8B model mid-trained on compassion-oriented synthetic data, using both SFT (helpfulness via Dolly-15k vs. coding via Magicoder-110K) and GRPO (helpfulness via RLHFlow vs. coding via Magicoder), evaluated on the ANIMA 2.2 benchmark and MORU benchmark (Moral Reasoning Under Uncertainty). Helpfulness training significantly degrades animal compassion relative to coding training on ANIMA (SFT: 35.7% vs. 65.2%; GRPO: 18.7% vs. 32.0%), replicating across two independent helpfulness datasets and two training paradigms. On English MORU items, helpfulness training degrades general moral reasoning by 25.5 percentage points (46.4% vs. 71.9%), a striking gap that rivals the compassion effect in magnitude. However, this effect does not transfer cross-lingually: on the multilingual MORU benchmark, the domain effect disappears (SFT: 52.3% vs. 51.2%). In contrast, the animal compassion effect transfers consistently across languages, with Magicoder's ANIMA percentage-point gain over the base model 4.5 times larger on non-English items than English items. This divergence suggests that values instilled through mid-training are encoded more deeply and cross-lingually than reasoning improvements from domain-specific post-training. These results suggest that, for labs building on value-laden mid-training, coding-domain post-training may better preserve mid-trained values than helpfulness post-training without harming general reasoning capabilities.

Jasmine Brazilek, Juliana Seawell

†Compassion Aligned Machine Learning (CaML)

Post-Training Pretraining Empathy Value Assistant Degradation+2

Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

Heterogeneous Variational Inference for Markov Degradation Hazard Models: Discretized Mixture with Interpretable Clusters

Bayesian finite mixture models can identify discrete risk clusters (low-risk vs. high-risk equipment), but face three critical bottlenecks: (1) insufficient degradation signals from coarse state discretization, (2) unstable cluster identification when data inherently supports fewer clusters than explored, and (3) computational infeasibility of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods for production deployment (7+ hours per model). We propose a practical framework combining (1) 8-state global percentile discretization that amplifies degradation events, (2) 30-dimensional feature engineering integrating statistical trends (22 features), continuous health indicators, and text embeddings (PCA-compressed to 3 dimensions), (3) interpretable model selection rules enforcing minimum cluster share and separation alongside WAIC, and (4) Automatic Differentiation Variational Inference (ADVI) with full-rank covariance for stable, fast estimation. Applied to 280 industrial pump equipment with 104,703 inspection records, we demonstrate: (1) Random effect models (baseline) show ADVI and NUTS produce nearly identical estimates with 15

\times

speedup, validating ADVI accuracy. (2) Finite mixture models identify optimal number of clusters with interpretability constraints. (3) NUTS exhibits severe convergence issues and label switching, while ADVI provides stable results in 84

\times

less time. We contributed that (1) First demonstration that fine-grained state discretization (8-state) is essential for mixture model stability in survival analysis.(2) Comprehensive feature engineering strategy combining statistical, continuous, and semantic signals. (3) Practical interpretability rules preventing overfitting in automated model selection. (4) Empirical evidence that ADVI outperforms NUTS for finite mixture models in terms of convergence, stability, and computational efficiency.

Takato Yasuno

Digital Business Department, Yachiyo Engineering Co., Ltd.

Mixture Models Variational Inference Model Selection Markov Chain Monte Carlo Degradation Mixtures+1

Apr 27, 2026cs.CV

Robust Deepfake Detection, NTIRE 2026 Challenge: Report

Robustness is a long-overlooked problem in deepfake detection. However, detection performance is nearly worthless in the real world if it suffers under exposure to even slight image degradation. In addition to weaker degradations that can accidentally occur in the image processing pipeline, there is another risk of malicious deepfakes that specifically introduce degradations, purposefully exploiting the detector's weaknesses in that regard. Here, we present an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Robust Deepfake Detection Challenge, which specifically addresses that problem. Participants were tasked with building a detector that would later be tested on an unknown test-set, which included both common and uncommon degradations of various strengths. With a total number of 337 participants and 57 submissions to the final leaderboard, the first edition of the challenge was well received. To ensure the reliability of the results, participants were given only 24h to complete the test run with no labels provided, limiting the possibility of training on the test data. Furthermore, the top solutions were scored on a private test-set to detect any such overfitting. This report presents the competition setting, dataset preparation, as well as details and performance of methods. Top methods rely on large foundation models, ensembles, and degradation training to combine generality and robustness.

Benedikt Hopf, Radu Timofte, Chenfan Qu +54

Deepfake Detection Visual Degradation Detection Performance Degradation Challenges

Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

Coverage-Based Calibration for Post-Training Quantization via Weighted Set Cover over Outlier Channels

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) compresses large language models to low bit-widths using a small calibration set, and its quality depends strongly on which samples are chosen. We identify a failure mode in which calibration samples fail to activate outlier channels, hidden dimensions with unusually large activations, causing the quantizer to underestimate their dynamic range and producing per-channel reconstruction errors that dominate layer-wise loss. Motivated by this observation, we argue that PTQ calibration quality is governed more by weighted outlier-channel coverage than by generic sample representativeness, and formulate calibration selection as a weighted set cover problem over outlier channels. The objective is monotone submodular, and the greedy algorithm, COVERCAL, operates on pre-computed activation statistics and requires no GPU time at selection. We further show that the weight choice is internally consistent: under a stylized clipping model, missed weighted coverage upper-bounds surrogate loss, justifying the weighted coverage objective as principled rather than purely empirical. Across LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, and Mistral, under AWQ and GPTQ backends and five downstream evaluations, COVERCAL improves over random, max-perplexity, max-activation-variance, and stratified baselines, with the largest gains at small calibration budgets. At INT4 with 128 samples, COVERCAL improves MMLU by 1.2 to 1.5 points over random calibration and reduces perplexity degradation by 15 to 30%; with 64 samples, it matches or exceeds random calibration at 256. The contribution is not a new PTQ backend but a formulation of calibration selection as weighted outlier coverage, with a simple, efficient algorithm and a surrogate-based justification.

Ibne Farabi Shihab, Sanjeda Akter, Anuj Sharma

Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University · Department of Civil, Construction & Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University

Post-Training Quantization Post-Training Model Weights Reconstruction Error Degradation Maximum Independent Set

Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

Causal Disentanglement-Inspired Degradation Representation Learning for Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Existing deep network-based full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) models typically work by performing pairwise comparisons of deep features from the reference and distorted images. In this paper, we approach this problem from a different perspective and propose a novel FR-IQA paradigm based on causal inference and decoupled representation learning. Unlike typical feature comparison-based FR-IQA models, our approach formulates degradation estimation as a causal disentanglement process guided by intervention on latent representations. We first decouple degradation and content representations by exploiting the content invariance between the reference and distorted images. Second, inspired by the human visual masking effect, we design a masking module to model the causal relationship between image content and degradation features, thereby extracting content-influenced degradation features from distorted images. Finally, quality scores are predicted from these degradation features using either supervised regression or label-free dimensionality reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves highly competitive performance on standard IQA benchmarks across fully supervised, few-label, and label-free settings. Furthermore, we evaluate the approach on diverse non-standard natural image domains with scarce data, including underwater, radiographic, medical, neutron, and screen-content images. Benefiting from its ability to perform scenario-specific training and prediction without labeled IQA data, our method exhibits superior cross-domain generalization compared to existing training-free FR-IQA models.

Zhen Zhang, Jielei Chu, Tian Zhang +5

School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 611756, China · School of Physics, Northeast Normal University, Changchun 130024, China · School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China +2

Query-Specific Degradation-Aware Representation Image Quality Assessment Degradation Representation Learning Causal Dimensionality Reduction

Apr 23, 2026cs.CV

FryNet: Dual-Stream Adversarial Fusion for Non-Destructive Frying Oil Oxidation Assessment

Monitoring frying oil degradation is critical for food safety, yet current practice relies on destructive wet-chemistry assays that provide no spatial information and are unsuitable for real-time use. We identify a fundamental obstacle in thermal-image-based inspection, the camera-fingerprint shortcut, whereby models memorize sensor-specific noise and thermal bias instead of learning oxidation chemistry, collapsing under video-disjoint evaluation. We propose FryNet, a dual-stream RGB-thermal framework that jointly performs oil-region segmentation, serviceability classification, and regression of four chemical oxidation indices (PV, p-AV, Totox, temperature) in a single forward pass. A ThermalMiT-B2 backbone with channel and spatial attention extracts thermal features, while an RGB-MAE Encoder learns chemically grounded representations via masked autoencoding and chemical alignment. Dual-Encoder DANN adversarially regularizes both streams against video identity via Gradient Reversal Layers, and FiLM fusion bridges thermal structure with RGB chemical context. On 7,226 paired frames across 28 frying videos, FryNet achieves 98.97% mIoU, 100% classification accuracy, and 2.32 mean regression MAE, outperforming all seven baselines.

Khaled R Ahmed, Toqi Tahamid Sarker, Taminul Islam +2

Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA · Qassim University, Saudi Arabia

Rgb-Thermal Degradation Fingerprint Feature Alignment

Apr 22, 2026physics.app-ph

Autonomous Reliability Qualification of Ga $_2$ O $_3$ -based Hydrogen and Temperature Sensors via Safe Active Learning

We present a Safe Active Learning (SAL) framework for autonomous reliability characterization of rectifying Ga

_2

O

_3

-based devices under coupled thermal and hydrogen stress. SAL treats rectification as a device-physics-motivated safety observable and models its evolution over elapsed time, temperature, and H

_2

concentration using a Gaussian-process surrogate. To handle condition-dependent and uncertain experiment durations, the method combines an adaptive completion-time window, time-window lower-confidence-bound safety checks, a trust region anchored to previously verified safe conditions, and a two-phase strategy that transitions from conservative safe exploration to progressively relaxed rectification targets as the device degrades. We first evaluate SAL in simulation, where it safely expands the explored region while learning the evolving rectification surface. We then demonstrate SAL experimentally on an automated high-temperature probe-station platform using a Pt/Cr

_2

O

_3

:Mg/

β

-Ga

_2

O

_3

device. In the reported campaign, phase 1 incurred only one unsafe measurement associated with spurious current-voltage sweeps, while phase 2 intentionally probed lower-rectification regimes. Finally, we use the curated SAL dataset for offline long-horizon forecasting of device response at a target voltage using a structured Gaussian-process model with a condition-dependent Kohlrausch--Williams--Watts mean and a residual covariance kernel. The model captures long-time, saturating degradation trends in an auxiliary validation dataset, illustrating how safety-aware autonomous experimentation enables both conservative characterization and subsequent degradation modeling. Although demonstrated here for a rectifying Ga

_2

O

_3

device, SAL is applicable to other systems where a measurable in situ safety observable can be defined.

Davi Febba, William A. Callahan, Anna Sacchi +1

Materials Science Center, National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), Golden, CO 80401, USA

Hydrogen System Components Degradation Pool-Based Active Learning

Apr 22, 2026cs.LG

Fast Bayesian equipment condition monitoring via simulation based inference: applications to heat exchanger health

Accurate condition monitoring of industrial equipment requires inferring latent degradation parameters from indirect sensor measurements under uncertainty. While traditional Bayesian methods like Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) provide rigorous uncertainty quantification, their heavy computational bottlenecks render them impractical for real-time process control. To overcome this limitation, we propose an AI-driven framework utilizing Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) powered by amortized neural posterior estimation to diagnose complex failure modes in heat exchangers. By training neural density estimators on a simulated dataset, our approach learns a direct, likelihood-free mapping from thermal-fluid observations to the full posterior distribution of degradation parameters. We benchmark this framework against an MCMC baseline across various synthetic fouling and leakage scenarios, including challenging low-probability, sparse-event failures. The results show that SBI achieves comparable diagnostic accuracy and reliable uncertainty quantification, while accelerating inference time by a factor of82

\times

compared to traditional sampling. The amortized nature of the neural network enables near-instantaneous inference, establishing SBI as a highly scalable, real-time alternative for probabilistic fault diagnosis and digital twin realization in complex engineering systems.

Peter Collett, Alexander Johannes Stasik, Simone Casolo +1

Cognite AS, Oslo, Norway · Department of Data Science, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway · Department for Mathematics and Cybernetics, SINTEF Digital, Oslo, Norway

Bayesian Inference Uncertainty Quantification Degradation