Lens

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5 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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Period ending 2026-09-14

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Lens.

Period ending 2026-09-07

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Lens.

82 papers

Latest in Lens

May 21, 2026cs.CV

Dual-Integrated Low-Latency Single-Lens Infrared Computational Imaging for Object Detection

Computational imaging enables compact infrared systems, but deep-learning pipelines that combine image reconstruction and object detection often introduce substantial inference latency. Most existing acceleration strategies compress the reconstruction network while overlooking physical priors from the optical path, leaving a trade-off between accuracy and speed. We present Physics-aware Dual-Integrated Network (PDI-Net), a low-latency framework that integrates infrared reconstruction with object detection and further embeds optical priors into the learning process. PDI-Net uses a supervised U-Net during training, while a semi-U-Net encoder shares features directly with a YOLO-based detector during inference, avoiding full image reconstruction. To bridge the gap between fidelity-oriented reconstruction features and detection-oriented semantics, we introduce a physics-aware large-small bridge (PALS-Bridge), which uses field-dependent point spread function priors to adaptively modulate multiscale convolutional branches. A physics-informed optical degradation simulation pipeline is also developed for training and validation. The method is deployed on a single-lens infrared camera, reducing system weight by about 50% compared with traditional multi-lens designs. On the M3FD benchmark under low-SNR conditions, PDI-Net reduces inference time by 84.06% compared with the Rec+Det with pruning strategy while improving mAP@0.5:0.95 by 5.07%. These results demonstrate compact, low-latency computational infrared imaging for real-time object detection on resource-constrained platforms.
Xuquan Wang, Guishuo Yang, Dapeng Yan +5
May 20, 2026cs.CV

Lens: Rethinking Training Efficiency for Foundational Text-to-Image Models

We introduce Lens, a 3.8B-parameter T2I model that achieves performance competitive with, and in several cases surpassing, state-of-the-art models with more than 6B parameters across various benchmarks, while requiring significantly less training compute. For example, Lens requires only about 19.3% of the training compute used by Z-Image. The training efficiency of Lens stems from two key strategies beyond its compact model size. First, we maximize data information density per training batch by (i) training on Lens-800M, a dataset of 800M densely captioned image-text pairs whose captions are generated by GPT-4.1 and contain approximately 109 words on average, providing richer semantic supervision than conventional short captions, and (ii) constructing each batch from images with multiple resolutions and diverse aspect ratios, thereby enlarging the effective visual coverage of each optimization step. Second, we improve convergence speed through careful architectural choices, including adopting a semantic VAE that provides better latent representations and employing a strong language encoder that accelerates optimization while enabling multilingual generalization from English-only training data. After pre-training, we apply RL with taxonomy-driven prompts (Lens-RL-8K) and structured reward rubrics to suppress artifacts and improve visual quality, a reasoner module with training-free system prompt search to better align user requests with the model, and distillation-based acceleration for 4-step inference. Through efficient training and systematic optimization, Lens generalizes to arbitrary aspect ratios from 1:2 to 2:1 and resolutions up to 1440^2, and supports prompts in several commonly used languages. Thanks to its compact size, Lens generates a 1024^2 image in 3.15 seconds on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU, while its distilled turbo version performs 4-step generation in 0.84 seconds.
Dong Chen, Fangyun Wei, Ziyu Wan +18
May 19, 2026cs.CV

Lens Privacy Sealing: A New Benchmark and Method for Physical Privacy-Preserving Action Recognition

RGB camera-based surveillance systems enable human action recognition for public safety and healthcare, yet raise serious privacy concerns. Existing methods rely on post-capture algorithms, which fail to protect privacy during data acquisition. We propose Lens Privacy Sealing (LPS), a simple hardware solution that physically obscures camera lenses with adjustable laminating film, providing pre-sensor privacy protection at minimal cost. Unlike software methods or expensive engineered optics, LPS achieves strong privacy through stochastic multi-layer scattering that is physically irreversible. We introduce the P3^3AR dataset for privacy-preserving action recognition, featuring both large-scale replay-captured (P3^3AR-NTU, 114K videos) and real-world collected (P3^3AR-PKU) subsets with privacy attribute annotations. To handle video degradation from LPS, we propose MSPNet, a single-stage framework incorporating Inter-Frame Noise Suppressor (IFNS) and Cross-Frame Semantic Aggregator (CFSA), enhanced by contrastive language-image pre-training for robust semantic extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSPNet with IFNS and CFSA nearly doubles action recognition accuracy compared to baseline methods while suppressing identity recognition to low levels. Comprehensive validation shows LPS achieves a superior privacy-utility trade-off compared to state-of-the-art hardware methods, resists reconstruction attacks including PSF inversion and data-driven recovery, and generalizes robustly across optical configurations and challenging environments. Code is available at https://github.com/wangzy01/MSPNet.
Mengyuan Liu, Ziyi Wang, Peiming Li +1
May 17, 2026cs.CL

NewsLens: A Multi-Agent Framework for Adversarial News Bias Navigation

Media bias detection has predominantly been framed as a classification task: assign a political label to an article or outlet. We argue this framing is too shallow: it identifies that bias exists but not where, how, or crucially, what is structurally omitted. We present NewsLens, a five-agent adversarial pipeline for structured news bias navigation. A Fact Verifier, Progressive Framing Analyst, Conservative Framing Analyst, Propaganda Detector, and Neutral Summarizer collaborate to deconstruct articles into interpretable framing maps, exposing ideological omissions, rhetorical manipulation, and framing boundaries. The system is evaluated on 15 articles across four geopolitical event clusters (India-Pakistan Kashmir, Gaza, Climate Policy, Ukraine) using Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct (4-bit quantised, Google Colab T4), with cross-model validation using Mistral 7B on the Kashmir cluster. Center outlets show the highest mean Perspective Divergence Score (PDS: Qwen 0.907, Mistral 0.729 on Kashmir subset); conservative-framing outlets show the highest mean Manipulation Index (MI: 0.600 across both models). Cross-model comparison shows high consistency for high-propaganda content (Republic World delta-PDS=0.125, MI=0.8 both models) and greater variance for nuanced reporting. Mann-Whitney U tests find no statistically significant between-group differences at n=15, reported honestly as a sample-size limitation confirmed by post-hoc power analysis. A partial ablation removing the Propaganda Detector shows degraded omission precision in the Neutral Summarizer output. The architecture extends prior lexical-geometric bias work to agentic LLM reasoning, and is fully reproducible using open-weight models without API keys.
Joy Bose
May 14, 2026cs.CV

MemLens: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Memory in Large Vision-Language Models

Memory is essential for large vision-language models (LVLMs) to handle long, multimodal interactions, with two method directions providing this capability: long-context LVLMs and memory-augmented agents. However, no existing benchmark conducts a systematic comparison of the two on questions that genuinely require multimodal evidence. To close this gap, we introduce MEMLENS, a comprehensive benchmark for memory in multimodal multi-session conversations, comprising 789 questions across five memory abilities (information extraction, multi-session reasoning, temporal reasoning, knowledge update, and answer refusal) at four standard context lengths (32K-256K tokens) under a cross-modal token-counting scheme. An image-ablation study confirms that solving MEMLENS requires visual evidence: removing evidence images drops two frontier LVLMs below 2% accuracy on the 80.4% of questions whose evidence includes images. Evaluating 27 LVLMs and 7 memory-augmented agents, we find that long-context LVLMs achieve high short-context accuracy through direct visual grounding but degrade as conversations grow, whereas memory agents are length-stable but lose visual fidelity under storage-time compression. Multi-session reasoning caps most systems below 30%, and neither approach alone solves the task. These results motivate hybrid architectures that combine long-context attention with structured multimodal retrieval. Our code is available at https://github.com/xrenaf/MEMLENS.
Xiyu Ren, Zhaowei Wang, Yiming Du +11
May 13, 2026cs.SE

AgentLens: Revealing The Lucky Pass Problem in SWE-Agent Evaluation

Evaluation of software engineering (SWE) agents is dominated by a binary signal: whether the final patch passes the tests. This outcome-only view treats a principled solution and a chaotic trial-and-error process as equivalent. We show that this equivalence is empirically false. We evaluate 2,614 OpenHands trajectories from eight model backends on 60 SWE-bench Verified tasks. Of these, 47 have enough passing trajectories to construct task-level process references, yielding a 1,815-trajectory evaluation subset. Among passing trajectories in this subset, 10.7% exhibit behavior we call a Lucky Pass: regression cycles, blind retries, missing verification, or temporally disordered exploration, implementation, and verification. We introduce AgentLens, a framework for process-level assessment of SWE-agent trajectories, and define AgentLens-Bench, a dataset of 1,815 trajectories annotated with quality scores, waste signals, divergence points, and 47 task-level Prefix Tree Acceptor (PTA) references. AgentLens builds PTA references by merging multiple passing solutions for the same task, and uses a context-sensitive intent labeler to assign actions to Exploration, Implementation, Verification, or Orchestration based on trajectory history rather than tool identity alone. On AgentLens-Bench, the quality score separates passing trajectories into Lucky, Solid, and Ideal tiers and further decomposes Lucky Passes into five recurring mechanisms. Across the eight model backends, Lucky rates range from 0.5% to 23.2%, and some models move by as many as five rank positions when ranked by quality score instead of pass rate. We plan to release the project repository soon, including AgentLens-Bench artifacts, the AgentLens SDK, and the analysis tooling.
Priyam Sahoo, Gaurav Mittal, Xiaomin Li +4
May 12, 2026cs.LG

Emergent and Subliminal Misalignment Through the Lens of Data-Mediated Transfer

Fine-tuning LLMs on narrow harmful datasets can induce Emergent Misalignment (EM), where models exhibit misaligned behavior far beyond the fine-tuning distribution. We argue that emergent misalignment can be better understood as a data-mediated transfer phenomenon: harmful fine-tuning examples do not induce uniform behavioral spillover, but interact with the structural properties of the dataset and the difficulty of the tasks relative to the model. Across our experiments, we find that misalignment appears more readily when fine-tuning and evaluation prompts share similar underlying functional structure, when prompts leave more room for coherent harmful completions, and when the target behavior has been more reliably learned by the model. The training pipeline itself also matters: pretraining composition shapes later misalignment. We further study Subliminal Learning (SL), where misalignment is transmitted by fine-tuning on seemingly benign data generated by a harmful teacher. Moving beyond the standard SFT setting, we for the first time compare this transfer under off-policy and on-policy distillation as well, allowing us to separate the roles of the teacher guidance and the training data distribution in transmitting misalignment. Together, these results argue for a data-centric view: Emergent/subliminal misalignment should not be treated as a simple consequence of isolated harmful fine-tuning examples, but as the result of interactions between fine-tuning data structure, pretraining distributions, and training channels.
Baris Askin, Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Anupam Nayak +3
May 10, 2026cs.CV

SoccerLens: Grounded Soccer Video Understanding Beyond Accuracy

Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown strong potential in soccer video understanding. However, given the high complexity of soccer videos due to large viewpoint variations, rapid shot transitions, and cluttered scenes, it remains unclear on whether VLMs rely on meaningful visual evidence or exploit spurious correlations and shortcut learning. Existing evaluation protocols focus primarily on classification accuracy and do not assess visual grounding. To address this limitation, we introduce SoccerLens, a benchmark for grounded soccer video understanding. The benchmark contains annotated video segments spanning 1313 common soccer events, with structured visual cues organized into three levels of semantic relevance. We further extend the attribution method of Chefer [arXiv:2103.15679] to jointly model spatial and temporal attention, and introduce evaluation metrics that measure whether model attention aligns with annotated cues or drifts toward spurious regions. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art soccer VLMs shows that, despite strong classification accuracy, current models fail to exceed 50%50\% grounding performance even under the loosest cue definitions and consistently underutilize temporal information. These results reveal a substantial gap between predictive performance and true visual grounding, highlighting the need for grounded evaluation in complex spatio-temporal domains such as soccer.
Ismael Elsharkawi, Ahmed Sait, Silvio Giancola +3
May 10, 2026cs.CV

Through the Lens of Character: Resolving Modality-Role Interference in Multimodal Role-Playing Agent

The advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has expanded Role-Playing Agents (RPAs) into visually grounded environments. However, human vision is inherently subjective and identity-driven, whereas existing MLLMs extract objective, character-agnostic features for general tasks. In RPAs, this generic visual noise overpowers fragile character traits, causing Modality-Role Interference (MRI), where agents struggle to integrate visual grounding and character consistency. To address this, we introduce the training-free Character-Aware Visual Intervention (CAVI) framework, enabling agents to perceive the world through the lens of character. CAVI systematically targets MRI: macroscopically, Character-Guided Token Pruning (CTP) restricts the visual receptive field to role-relevant entities; microscopically, Orthogonal Feature Modulation (OFM) projects tokens onto a character-context subspace to extract aligned facts; and during decoding, Modality-Adaptive Role Steering (MARS) dynamically optimizes steering intensity based on visual reliance. Extensive experiments show CAVI effectively alleviates MRI, significantly enhancing character-consistent multimodal interactions.
Yihong Tang, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai +1
May 8, 2026cs.AI

SkillLens: Adaptive Multi-Granularity Skill Reuse for Cost-Efficient LLM Agents

Skill libraries have become a practical way for LLM agents to reuse procedural experience across tasks. However, existing systems typically treat skills as flat, single-resolution prompt blocks. This creates a tension between relevance and cost: injecting coarse skills can introduce irrelevant or misleading context, while rewriting entire skills is expensive and often unnecessary. We propose SkillLens, a hierarchical skill-evolution framework that organizes skills into a four-layer graph of policies, strategies, procedures, and primitives, and retrieves them at mixed granularity. Given a task, SkillLens first retrieves semantically relevant skill seeds, expands them through degree-corrected random walk over the skill graph, and then uses a verifier to decide whether each visited unit should be accepted, decomposed, rewritten, or skipped. This enables the agent to reuse compatible subskills directly while adapting only locally mismatched components. To improve the system over time, SkillLens further refines multi-granularity skills and verifier in order to improve its routing decisions. We provide theoretical analysis showing that mixed-granularity adaptation incurs sublinear cost under sparse mismatch assumptions and that the evolutionary update rule monotonically improves the validation objective until a local optimum. Across MuLocbench and ALFWorld, SkillLens consistently improves over strong skill-based baselines, achieving up to a 6.31 percentage-point Acc@1 gain for bug localization and raising agent success rate from 45.00% to 51.31%.
Yongliang Miao, Ziyang Yu, Liang Zhao +2
May 8, 2026cs.CV

Breaking Spatial Uniformity: Prior-Guided Mamba with Radial Serialization for Lens Flare Removal

Lens flares, caused by complex optical aberrations, severely degrade image quality especially in nighttime photography. Although recent restoration methods have made remarkable progress, most still rely on spatially uniform processing. They are failing to handle the region-dependent restoration demands of flare scenes, where saturated light sources should be preserved, flare artifacts removed, and background details recovered. To address this challenge, we propose DeflareMambav2, a prior-guided Mamba framework for lens flare removal. Specifically, we introduce a Flare Prior Network (FPN) to estimate flare priors and guide adaptive restoration. Besides, a novel radial serialization strategy breaks spatially homogeneous processing by performing flare-aware targeted sampling, and better supports long-range modeling in State Space Models (SSMs). Based on these priors, the backbone adopts a dual-level adaptive scheme. It explicitly preserves light-source regions to avoid over-processing, and applies curriculum-based restoration to the remaining contaminated areas while calibrating restoration intensity at the pixel level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeflareMambav2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced parameter burden. Code is available at https://github.com/BNU-ERC-ITEA/DeflareMambav2.
Zijia Fu, Yuanfei Huang, Lizhi Wang +1
May 7, 2026cs.CV

LensVLM: Selective Context Expansion for Compressed Visual Representation of Text

Vision Language Models (VLMs) offer the exciting possibility of processing text as rendered images, bypassing the need for tokenizing the text into long token sequences. Since VLM image encoders map fixed-size images to a fixed number of visual tokens, varying rendering resolution provides a fine-grained compression knob. However, accuracy deteriorates quickly as compression increases: characters shrink below the vision encoder's effective resolution, making them indistinguishable. To address this, we propose LensVLM, an inference framework and post-training recipe that enables VLMs to scan compressed images, then selectively expand only the relevant images to their uncompressed form via learned tools. Building on Qwen3.5-9B-Base, LensVLM maintains accuracy comparable to the full-text upper bound at 4.3x effective compression and outperforms retrieval-based, text- and visual-compression baselines up to 10.1x effective compression across seven text QA benchmarks. LensVLM also generalizes to multimodal document and code understanding tasks, with the accuracy gain over baselines growing as compression increases. Our analysis validates this approach: training makes visual compression robust to rendering choices, and as compression grows the model increasingly relies on expanded content rather than unreliable visual reading. The analysis also yields practical tool-choice guidance: text expansion is preferable for rendered text, while high-resolution image expansion suits native documents whose layout cues carry task-relevant information.
Roy Xie, Dan Friedman, Donghan Yu +7
May 7, 2026cs.LG

AffineLens: Capturing the Continuous Piecewise Affine Functions of Neural Networks

Piecewise affine neural networks (PANNs) provide a principled geometric perspective on neural network expressivity by characterizing the input--output map as a continuous piecewise affine (CPA) function whose complexity is governed by the number, arrangement, and shapes of its affine regions. However, existing interpretability and expressivity analyses often rely on indirect proxies (e.g., activation statistics or theoretical upper bounds) and rarely offer practical, accurate tools for enumerating and visualizing the induced region partition under realistic architectures and bounded input domains. In this work, we present AffineLens, a unified framework for computing the hyperplane arrangements and polyhedral structures underlying PANNs. Given a calibrated (bounded) input polytope, AffineLens identifies the subset of neuron-induced hyperplanes that intersect the domain, enumerates the resulting affine sub-regions in a layer-wise manner, and returns provably non-empty maximal CPA regions together with interior representatives. The framework further provides visualizations of region partitioning and decision boundaries, enabling qualitative inspection alongside quantitative region counts. By exploiting the affine restriction property of CPA networks under fixed activation patterns, AffineLens supports a broad class of modern components, including batch normalization, pooling, residual connections, multilayer perceptrons, and convolutional layers. Finally, we use AffineLens to perform a systematic empirical study of architectural expressivity, comparing networks through region complexity metrics and revealing how design choices influence the geometry of learned functions.
Yi Wei, Xuan Qi, Furao Shen +3
May 7, 2026stat.ML

Spectral Lens: Activation and Gradient Spectra as Diagnostics of LLM Optimization

Training loss and throughput can hide distinct internal representation in language-model training. To examine these hidden mechanics, we use spectral measurements as practical and operational diagnostics. Using a controlled family of decoder-only models adapted from the modded NanoGPT codebase, we introduce an empirical protocol based on activation covariance and per-sample gradient SVD spectra. This dual-view reveals three empirical findings and one mechanistic explanation. First, batch size acts as a latent determinant of representation geometry: runs that reach equal loss settle into systematically distinct activation spectra. Second, the activation covariance tail measured early in training reliably forecasts downstream token efficiency. Third, movement of the activation spectrum head (leading modes), together with gradient spectra, characterizes underlying learning-dynamics changes, separating learning-side architectural improvements from primarily execution-side gains. These predictive and diagnostic signals persist across the 12-, 36-, and 48-layer model tiers. Finally, a mechanistic model proves the main observations and explains how activation covariance spectra correlate with task-aligned feature learning.
Andy Zeyi Liu, Elliot Paquette, John Sous
May 4, 2026stat.ML

Middle-mile logistics through the lens of goal-conditioned reinforcement learning

Middle-mile logistics describes the problem of routing parcels through a network of hubs linked by trucks with finite capacity. We rephrase this as a multi-object goal-conditioned MDP. Our method combines graph neural networks with model-free RL, extracting small feature graphs from the environment state.
Onno Eberhard, Thibaut Cuvelier, Michal Valko +1
May 2, 2026cs.CV

Rethinking Model Selection in VLM Through the Lens of Gromov-Wasserstein Distance

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enhanced traditional LLMs with visual capabilities through the integration of vision encoders. While recent works have explored various combinations of vision encoders and LLMs, there still lacks a principled understanding of what makes a vision encoder suitable for VLM alignment. In this paper, we systematically investigate this question via comprehensive experiments on a curated collection of 19 pre-trained vision encoders from diverse sources. We first demonstrate that common practices, such as choosing encoders with the largest size or highest zero-shot accuracy, consistently fail to identify optimal models. In fact, these metrics show only weak to moderate correlation with VLM performance. This intriguing finding begs a fundamental question: What factors of vision-encoders matter in VLM? Through comprehensive analysis, we identify that the structural similarity across modalities plays a crucial but previously overlooked role in vision-encoder selection, which we measure using the Gromov-Wasserstein distance as a proxy. From a theoretical perspective, we show that the learnability of cross-modality mapping can be provably associated with the Gromov-Wasserstein distance. Empirical verification on 60+ full VLM training runs shows that our proposed inference-only metric performs significantly better than alternative model selection strategies and exhibits a much stronger correlation with final VLM performance, thereby enabling efficient and effective prediction of VLM performance before full training.
Muyang Li, Yucheng Liu, Jianbo Ma +3
Apr 22, 2026cs.HC

AgentLens: Adaptive Visual Modalities for Human-Agent Interaction in Mobile GUI Agents

Mobile GUI agents can automate smartphone tasks by interacting directly with app interfaces, but how they should communicate with users during execution remains underexplored. Existing systems rely on two extremes: foreground execution, which maximizes transparency but prevents multitasking, and background execution, which supports multitasking but provides little visual awareness. Through iterative formative studies, we found that users prefer a hybrid model with just-in-time visual interaction, but the most effective visualization modality depends on the task. Motivated by this, we present AgentLens, a mobile GUI agent that adaptively uses three visual modalities during human-agent interaction: Full UI, Partial UI, and GenUI. AgentLens extends a standard mobile agent with adaptive communication actions and uses Virtual Display to enable background execution with selective visual overlays. In a controlled study with 21 participants, AgentLens was preferred by 85.7% of participants and achieved the highest usability (1.94 Overall PSSUQ) and adoption-intent (6.43/7).
Jeonghyeon Kim, Byeongjun Joung, Junwon Lee +3
Apr 21, 2026cs.CR

ProjLens: Unveiling the Role of Projectors in Multimodal Model Safety

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal understanding and generation, yet their deployment is threatened by critical safety vulnerabilities. While prior works have demonstrated the feasibility of backdoors in MLLMs via fine-tuning data poisoning to manipulate inference, the underlying mechanisms of backdoor attacks remain opaque, complicating the understanding and mitigation. To bridge this gap, we propose ProjLens, an interpretability framework designed to demystify MLLMs backdoors. We first establish that normal downstream task alignment--even when restricted to projector fine--tuning--introduces vulnerability to backdoor injection, whose activation mechanism is different from that observed in text-only LLMs. Through extensive experiments across four backdoor variants, we uncover:(1) Low-Rank Structure: Backdoor injection updates appear overall full-rank and lack dedicated ``trigger neurons'', but the backdoor-critical parameters are encoded within a low-rank subspace of the projector;(2) Activation Mechanism: Both clean and poisoned embedding undergoes a semantic shift toward a shared direction aligned with the backdoor target, but the shifting magnitude scales linearly with the input norm, resulting in the distinct backdoor activation on poisoned samples. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProjLens-8FD7
Kun Wang, Cheng Qian, Miao Yu +6
Mar 28, 2026math.OC

Adjoint Matching through the Lens of the Stochastic Maximum Principle in Optimal Control

Reward fine-tuning of diffusion and flow models and sampling from tilted or Boltzmann distributions can both be formulated as stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems, where learning an optimal generative dynamics corresponds to optimizing a control under SDE constraints. In this work, we revisit and generalize Adjoint Matching, a recently proposed SOC-based method for learning optimal controls, and place it on a rigorous footing by deriving it from the Stochastic Maximum Principle (SMP). We formulate a general Hamiltonian adjoint matching objective for SOC problems with control-dependent drift and diffusion and convex running costs, and show that its expected value has the same first variation as the original SOC objective. As a consequence, critical points satisfy the Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) stationarity conditions. In the important practical case of state- and control-independent diffusion, we recover the lean adjoint matching loss previously introduced, which avoids second-order terms and whose critical points coincide with the optimal control under mild uniqueness assumptions. Numerical experiments confirm that the extra terms it discards become necessary once the diffusion is state-dependent. Finally, we show that adjoint matching can be precisely interpreted as a continuous-time method of successive approximations induced by the SMP, yielding a practical and implementable alternative to classical SMP-based algorithms, which are obstructed by intractable martingale terms in the stochastic setting. These results are also of independent interest to the stochastic control community, providing new implementable objectives and a viable pathway for SMP-based iterations in stochastic problems.
Carles Domingo-Enrich, Jiequn Han
Nov 6, 2025cs.CV

A Linear Fractional Transformation Model and Calibration Method for Light Field Camera

Accurate intrinsic calibration is a crucial yet challenging prerequisite for 3D reconstruction using light field cameras. Existing calibration models typically analyze the main lens and micro lens array (MLA) in a coupled manner, resulting in high complexity and a large number of parameters. In this paper, we propose a linear fractional transformation (LFT) model that introduces a single parameter αα to decouple the imaging processes of the main lens and the MLA. A dedicated matrix Hα\mathbf{H}_α is designed to characterize the MLA projection, enabling the main lens and the MLA to be calibrated independently. The proposed calibration method consists of an analytical least-squares solution for Hα\mathbf{H}_α, followed by joint nonlinear refinement of all intrinsic parameters. Experimental results on both physical datasets and simulated data demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a mean translation error of 2.1%2.1\%, outperforming the state-of-the-art, while maintaining sub-pixel reprojection accuracy. The complete codebase, including a light field simulator based on the proposed model, is openly available to the research community.
Zhong Chen, Changfeng Chen
Oct 17, 2025stat.ML

Adaptive Conformal Inference through the Lens of Blackwell Approachability

This article considers an online version of conformal inference, called adaptive conformal inference [ACI] and introduced by Gibbs and Candès (2021): prediction sets are issued sequentially, after observing features and before the outcomes are revealed. These sets are evaluated both in terms of validity (the fraction of rounds where the outcome was lying in the prediction set) and efficiency (the average lengths of the prediction sets). The two criteria point to different directions (validity favors larger sets). We also target a wide range of scenarios, with exchangeable data and arbitrary data (lack of any stochastic guarantees) as two extremes. A series of existing strategies for ACI typically guarantee that empirical coverage converges to the desired level for arbitrary sequences, but they generally lack simultaneous efficiency guarantees. To provide a unified study, we first formulate ACI as a repeated two-player game with finite action sets and vector-valued payoffs encoding validity and efficiency. Building on this reformulation, we introduce a strategy based on Blackwell approachability and on its opportunistic extension by Bernstein et al. (2014) that ensures validity while adapting the efficiency of the prediction intervals to the underlying degree of stochasticity of the opponent player. The resulting guarantee is "best of many worlds": it recovers the relevant efficiency guarantees in exchangeable and adversarial settings, and provides guarantees in intermediate settings that arise in typical applications such as the forecasting of time series.
Guillaume Principato, Gilles Stoltz
Date pendingcs.SE

FaultLens: Learning Compact Behavioral Test Suites for Generated Operational Programs

Generated operational programs are often validated with either a few hand-written examples or exhaustive regression suites. The former can miss sparse boundary and interaction faults, while the latter can be unnecessarily expensive. We introduce FaultLens, a method for learning compact behavioral test suites while preserving an auditable connection to executed evidence. It executes a rich probe domain once, stores the fault-probe kill relation as a sparse outcome cache, and learns probe orderings only from earlier program generations. A fault-driven greedy component exploits known kill structure, while a mutation-independent diversity component covers probe families, cases, templates, and temporal bins. Their alternating hybrid remains useful when a new program contains a fault mechanism absent from ordering construction. We evaluate twenty generated operational policies across four environments, ten execution seeds, 1,200 measured run summaries, 2,160 controlled program transformations, and 4,120,200 executed program-probe pairs. Of 1,960 intended faulty transformations, 1,779 alter a contract or output somewhere in the finite audit domain; 200 additional controls preserve behavior. A 32-probe hybrid learned on generations 1-3 covers 576/582 (99.0%) dynamically killable faults in generations 4-5 using 1.2-2.0% of the exhaustive domain. With an entire fault family withheld from training, diversity raises scenario-family macro coverage from 84.6% to 94.9%. In a downstream deployment study, a conservative admission rule reduces severe tail regressions from 15/20 program-environment groups to 0/20. FaultLens provides a prioritized evidence mechanism, not a proof of correctness, and makes its budget, evidence source, generalization split, and misses explicit.
Zeming Liu, Hang Lyu, Jingtao Zhang