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16 papers in the last four weeks, up 129% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 101

May 31, 2026cs.SD

A Lightweight Slot-Attention Framework for Multi-Instrument Multi-Pitch Estimation

Multi-pitch estimation (MPE) typically predicts which pitches are active in a mixture, but not which instrument or source produced them. This paper investigates a lightweight slot-attention framework for multi-instrument MPE (MI-MPE), where a mixture CQT is mapped to an unordered set of source-like pitch maps. The model uses permutation-invariant Hungarian matching to avoid fixed output semantics and treats the number of slots as an upper bound on the number of active sources. We further study two modular extensions: a self-supervised timbre encoder that provides training-time targets for slot-level timbre embeddings, and a polyphony branch that regularizes the pitch density of mixture- and slot-level predictions. Experiments show that Hungarian matching substantially improves instrument family decomposition on URMP. Stem-level prediction remains more challenging: timbre and polyphony supervision improve selected configurations, but do not consistently resolve source assignment. The results suggest that slot-based architectures are a promising direction for source-aware MPE, while highlighting the need to couple auxiliary musical cues to slot identity more carefully.

Michael Taenzer

Electronic Media Technology Group Ilmenau University of Technology Ilmenau, Germany

Music Structure Analysis Symbolic Music Generation Lightweight

May 31, 2026cs.LG

FreqLite: A Lightweight Frequency-Decomposed Linear Model with Adaptive Reversible Normalization for Robust Long-Term Time-Series Forecasting

Long-term time-series forecasting needs models that are accurate yet efficient enough for commodity hardware. Lightweight linear forecasters are remarkably strong in this regime, yet they leave two openings: reversible instance normalization (RevIN) de-normalizes the entire horizon with a single lookback statistic, which is inaccurate under non-stationarity, and time-domain trend/seasonal decomposition relies on a fixed, non-adaptive filter. We present FreqLite, an ultra-lightweight, channel-independent frequency-decomposed linear forecaster: a learnable, lossless, partition-of-unity spectral filter splits the input into bands that are forecast by per-band linear heads and, unlike low-pass-truncation approaches, the high-frequency band is retained and modeled. FreqLite is the best lightweight model on the standard long-term forecasting benchmarks and, at long lookback (L=336), attains a lower average error than a PatchTST Transformer (0.3244 vs. 0.3587 MSE) while using 4x fewer parameters, 2.2x less memory, and 2.2x less time per epoch on a single 4 GB laptop GPU; although modest in magnitude, its improvements are statistically significant under paired Wilcoxon tests across all matched cells (p < 1e-5). We further introduce Adaptive Reversible Instance Normalization (A-RevIN), a regime-adaptive reversible normalization that strictly generalizes RevIN (recovered exactly when its gate is closed), engages under non-stationarity, and reduces to RevIN without harm on stationary data. We validate this on both a real strongly non-stationary dataset (ILI, up to ~5% MSE reduction) and a controlled synthetic drift sweep in which A-RevIN's benefit and its learned gate both rise monotonically with injected non-stationarity. Every component is independently ablatable (Linear and RLinear are special cases of FreqLite), and all results are reproducible on commodity hardware.

Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig, Syeda Anshrah Gillani

Fandaqah, Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia · Hamdard University, Karachi, Pakistan

Non-Stationarity Batch Normalization Lightweight

May 30, 2026cs.CR

A Lightweight Hybrid MLP-Based Framework for Real-Time Phishing URL Detection Using Structural URL Features

Phishing attacks remain a major cybersecurity threat, exploiting deceptive URLs to steal sensitive user information. Traditional blacklist and rule-based detection approaches are reactive and often fail to identify newly emerging phishing URLs. This paper proposes a lightweight hybrid framework for real-time phishing URL detection that combines blacklist-based screening with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier operating solely on structural URL features. The framework extracts 16 URL-derived features capturing structural, domain-based, and security-related characteristics without requiring webpage content access, third-party APIs, or visual rendering, making it computationally efficient for real-time deployment. The system was trained and evaluated on the PhiUSIIL phishing dataset containing 235,795 labelled URLs. Experimental results show that the proposed MLP achieved 99.24% accuracy, 98.74% precision, 99.95% recall, 99.34% F1-score, and 99.65% ROC-AUC, outperforming Random Forest, Logistic Regression, XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost under the same evaluation setting. The hybrid architecture achieved an average inference latency of 1.2 ms per URL and a peak throughput of 4,200 URLs per second under concurrent processing. A functional desktop application prototype, CyberGuard, further demonstrates deployment viability. The results indicate that the proposed framework provides an accurate and computationally efficient solution for real-time phishing URL detection in resource-constrained environments.

Uche Unoke Emmanuel, Gideon Francis Oghie

Department of Cyber Security Science, School of Information and Communication Technology, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Nigeria

Phishing Threat Detection Lightweight Screening

May 28, 2026cs.AI

BitTP: The Lightweight Trajectory Prediction Model with BitLLM for Edge-Devices

Trajectory prediction is a fundamental task for autonomous systems, requiring complex reasoning about multi-agent interactions and intents. Large language models (LLMs) have recently been adopted for this task, as they provide strong contextual reasoning and interpretable, language-based trajectory representations. However, these LLM-based predictors are extremely memory- and compute-intensive, making them difficult to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices such as on-board computers in autonomous robots. To bridge this gap, we propose BitTP, which converts an LLM-based trajectory predictor into a lightweight bitlinear architecture. We demonstrate that weight-only quantization to 1.58-bit (BitTP-Weight) is optimal. Crucially, activations must remain in full precision, as quantizing them leads to severe degradation and instability in spatio-temporal reasoning. Empirically, BitTP-Weight not only preserves but improves prediction quality over the full-precision (BF16) LLM baseline, reducing ADE by 14.29% and FDE by 20.97% on average, while simultaneously reducing memory usage and inference latency relative to other quantization methods. These results demonstrate that carefully designed quantization acts as an effective regularizer, enabling the practical deployment of sophisticated LLM-based reasoning on edge devices. Code is available at: https://github.com/MintCat98/BitTP.

Mincheol Kang, Hyunjin Lim, Bomin Kang +1

1KAIST, Republic of Korea · 2DGIST, Republic of Korea

Large Language Model Quantization Ego-Trajectory Prediction Inference Latency Large Language Models(Llms Lightweight Mobile Robots

May 28, 2026cs.CL

Revisiting Observation Reduction for Web Agents: Comprehensive Evaluation with a Lightweight Framework

HTML observations in LLM-based web agents are extremely long, and while many reduction methods have been proposed, it remains unclear which methods reduce overall agent latency while maintaining performance. The main obstacle is the high cost of end-to-end evaluation: in our experiments, evaluating 11 methods across 32 configurations on 33 tasks of WorkArena L1 required 232.4 cumulative hours. To address this, we propose a lightweight evaluation framework based on the Minimal Failure Set (MFS), the minimal set of HTML elements whose removal causes task failure. We define coverage as the fraction of instances in which a reduction method fully retains the MFS, which serves as a proxy metric that requires neither web access nor LLM inference. We validate that coverage strongly correlates with end-to-end success rate, with over 100

\times

speedup in cumulative evaluation time on both benchmarks. Using this framework, we find that extractive HTML reduction methods require either high computation cost or domain-specific optimization to reduce agent latency while maintaining performance. Building on this, we optimize a pruning program on MFS training data, achieving 2.2

\times

faster per-step latency on WorkArena L1 while retaining 84% of the original success rate, and 3.1

\times

faster on WebLinx while retaining 89%.

Masafumi Enomoto, Ryoma Obara, Haochen Zhang +1

NEC Corporation

Web Agents LLM Inference Optimization Lightweight

May 27, 2026cs.AI

DiagramRAG: A Lightweight Framework to Retrieve Scientific Diagram for Figure Generation

Scientific diagrams are essential for communicating complex methodologies in academic papers. A natural way for researchers to specify such diagrams is through rough sketches, where text labels, connectors, and spatial arrangements express early semantic and topological intentions. However, sketches are usually incomplete, making them insufficient for directly producing publication-quality diagrams. Existing sketch-based generation methods mainly reconstruct the sketch itself, while recent text-driven diagram generation frameworks rely on textual semantics and do not fully exploit the topological structure contained in sketches. In this paper, we introduce DiagramRAG, a lightweight retrieval-augmented framework for sketch-based scientific diagram completion. Given a user sketch, DiagramRAG retrieves reference diagrams that are both semantically relevant to the sketch content and topologically compatible with its structure, and uses them to guide downstream diagram generation. To enable efficient structure-aware retrieval, we represent diagrams as knowledge graphs, synthesize sketch variants at different simplification levels, and train an embedding model to align sketches with compatible diagrams in a shared space. The retrieved references further provide content, topology, and visual priors for completing and rendering the final diagram. Experiments show that DiagramRAG achieves F1-scores of 0.848 and 0.802 on DiagramBank and FigureBench, respectively, and improves generation quality with the best VLM-as-a-Judge score of 7.170, while reducing inference latency to 35.48 seconds per sample. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DiagramRAG-A262 and https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous-review-a262/DiagramSketch.

Xinjiang Yu, Junyi Han, Zhuofan Chen +7

Beijing Institute of Technology

Diagrams Sketches Graph-Based Retrieval Augmented Generation Retrievers Lightweight

May 21, 2026cs.LG

ModeSwitch-LLM: A Lightweight Phase-Aware Controller for Cross-Mode LLM Inference on a Single GPU

ModeSwitch-LLM is a lightweight request-boundary controller for improving single-GPU large language model inference efficiency by routing each request to an appropriate fixed inference mode. Instead of relying on one static serving configuration, the system selects among FP16, quantized modes, speculative decoding, and hybrid modes such as GPTQ plus prefix caching and INT8 plus continuous batching using cheap workload-level features. We evaluate ModeSwitch-LLM on Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct served on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU. On deployment-style synthetic workloads, the online controller achieves a 2.10x mean latency speedup over FP16 and a 0.48x mean energy ratio, corresponding to 51.7% lower energy per token. On automatic benchmarks used as a quality gate, accuracy remains close to FP16 with a mean delta of +0.17 percentage points. We also evaluate lightweight learned routers, but find that they do not clearly outperform the rule-based controller because they add routing overhead and more often select modes that violate quality, energy, or memory constraints. These results show that simple request-aware routing can recover substantial efficiency from existing inference modes without retraining the model or changing its architecture.

Aman Sunesh, Ali Alshehhi, Hivansh Dhakne

Department of Computer Engineering NYU Abu Dhabi Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates · Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences New York University New York, United States · Department of Computer Engineering New York University New York, United States

LLM Inference Optimization Large Language Models(Llms Nvidia Lightweight Robust Control

May 21, 2026cs.RO

SE3Kit: A Lightweight Python Library for Specialized Geometric Primitives in Robotics

The Python robotics ecosystem faces a challenge: while many libraries exist for rigid body transformations, few are both lightweight and mathematically strict. This paper introduces SE3Kit, a lightweight Python library efficient operations on the Special Euclidean Group SE(3) and the Special Orthogonal Group SO(3). Unlike established frameworks that require heavy dependencies (e.g., SpatialMath, PyPose) or general tools that lack robotics-specific features (e.g., SciPy), SE3Kit targets the gap between these extremes. It is designed for embedded deployment, rapid prototyping, and education while providing rigorous mathematical implementation. It provides a pure-Python, NumPy-only implementation of Lie Group operations, without the overhead of deep learning or other visualization software.

Daniyal Maroufi, Omid Rezayof, Farshid Alambeigi

1 1D. Maroufi, O. Rezayof and F. Alambeigi are with the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Robotics at The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA.

Lie Group Object Geometry Python Lightweight

May 18, 2026cs.SE

CommitDistill: A Lightweight Knowledge-Centric Memory Layer for Software Repositories

Software repositories accumulate large amounts of unstructured knowledge in commit messages, pull-request discussions, and issue threads, but developers and AI coding assistants rarely reuse this history effectively. Recent work on typed-memory architectures for LLM agents (MemGPT, generative agents, and the PlugMem module of Yang et al.) argues that agent memory should be distilled, typed knowledge rather than raw interaction text. We adapt that stance to a software repository's own git history under a constrained regime: deterministic, dependency-free, local-only, no embeddings. We present CommitDistill, an open-source Python prototype that mines a local git history into typed knowledge units (Facts, Skills, Patterns) using deterministic regex and surfaces them through a TF-IDF retriever with a calibrated silence threshold (theta = 2.5) that abstains on out-of-distribution queries. The artefact is a trust-instrumented memory substrate: deterministic, no external service, inspectable plain-JSON store, tunable abstention. A case study on five public repositories spanning Python, JavaScript, C, and Java (25,000 commits, 1,167 extracted units) reports useful-precision 0.525 at Cohen's kappa = 0.633 on 40 dual-annotated Python units. The decisive finding is budget-constrained retrieval: at a 256-character per-query budget, CommitDistill reaches 0.750 hit-rate on a 12-query benchmark against BM25's 0.333 and git log --grep's 0.083. On a four-arm paired LLM-as-judge evaluation (n=200 time-travel bug-fixes, two judges) covering control, CommitDistill, a body-budget-matched CD-Hybrid, and BM25, no condition produces a statistically detectable lift over control on the headline mean and CD-Hybrid is indistinguishable from BM25 head-to-head. Extraction over 10,000 commits completes in under 4 seconds on a laptop. Source, annotations, baselines, and a reproducibility script accompany this paper.

Divya Chukkapalli, Thejesh Avula, Aditya Aggarwal +2

Microsoft Corporation

Commits Lightweight

May 18, 2026cs.CV

Embedded ConvNet Ensembles: A Lightweight Approach to Recognize Arabic Handwritten Characters

Arabic Handwritten Character Recognition (AHCR) has recently advanced significantly with deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets). However, many models in the literature are deep and computationally expensive in terms of parameters and FLOPs, limiting their deployment on resource-constrained devices, which are increasingly common. This study addresses this gap by proposing a combination of lightweight embedded ConvNet models and ensemble learning techniques. Extensive experiments were conducted to identify best practices in AHCR, considering training hyperparameters, learning strategies, model choices, and ensemble methods. Results show that embedded models can achieve accuracy comparable to, or even surpassing, heavier architectures. Ensemble learning further enhances performance with only modest computational overhead, particularly under challenging training scenarios. Among the ensembling strategies, soft voting yielded the best overall results.

Mohsine El Khayati, Rachid Elouahbi, Abdelillah Semma

Systems theory and informatics laboratory Moulay Ismail University of Meknes Meknes, Morocco · Laboratory of Computer Science and Applications Moulay Ismail University of Meknes Meknes, Morocco · Computer Science Dept. EST of Sidi Bennour Chouaib Doukkali University Eljadida, Morocco

Handwritten Text Recognition Ensemble Lightweight

May 17, 2026cs.CR

Fast and Lightweight Backdoor Detection via Head Random Probing

Deep neural networks (DNNs) remain critically vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing post-training detectors often require clean or surrogate data, gradients, or iterative trigger reconstruction, leading to high computational costs and limited robustness under practical model-auditing scenarios. In this paper, we propose HTell, a fast and lightweight data-free backdoor detector based on head random probing. Instead of reconstructing diverse trigger patterns, HTell inspects their unified manifestation in the prediction head: backdoored models tend to exhibit abnormal response concentration on the target class under random latent probes. HTell generates architecture-aware random latent probes, feeds them directly into the model head, and detects backdoors by analyzing class-wise response statistics, without accessing real or surrogate data, model gradients, or parameter optimization. We evaluate HTell on a large-scale benchmark containing more than 6,000 backdoored models and over 700 clean models, covering 4 datasets, 14 architectures, and 21 types of backdoor attacks. HTell achieves 99.03% true positive rate and 2.11% false positive rate with only 12.69 ms/model detection latency, reducing the time cost by over 30,000

\times

compared with representative gradient-based detectors. These results demonstrate that head random probing provides an accurate, robust, and efficient solution for large-scale data-free backdoor model auditing.

Yinbo Yu, Xueyu Yin, Jing Fang +4

College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210016, China · School of Cybersecurity, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China · Shenzhen Research Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518057, China +1

Clean Label Backdoor Attack Unsupervised Detection Lightweight

May 17, 2026cs.CR

Lightweight and Fast Backdoor Model Detection

Deep neural networks (DNN), despite their remarkable performance, are highly vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses mainly rely on activation anomaly analysis or trigger reverse engineering and often require clean samples or prior knowledge of trigger patterns, resulting in limited efficacy, practicability, and generalizability. More critically, while advanced attacks can implement backdoor implantation in milliseconds, current detection approaches typically demand minutes or even hours. To this end, we propose DFBScanner, a lightweight static parameter inspection framework for fast backdoor scanning. DFBScanner leverages our key observation that backdoor-induced feature perturbations can lead to distinctive and anomalous parameter updates in the final classification layer. Hence, we shift our detection focus from recognizing diverse and attack-specific trigger patterns targeted by prior work, to identifying the unified backdoor manifestation within the final layer, thereby enabling efficient and attack-agnostic detection. Specifically, by constructing and strategically combining multiple anomaly indicators of the final-layer parameters into a Trojan clue, DFBScanner detects backdoors through maximum anomaly scoring. DFBScanner is evaluated on a large-scale backdoor benchmark, including over 5,000 backdoor models trained on 4 datasets, 12 network architectures, 20 types of backdoor triggers, 2 attack strategies (all-to-one and -all), and 3 backdoor injection methods (data poisoning, training pipeline manipulation, and bit-flips). Numerical results show that DFBScanner achieves a 97.17% true-positive rate, 0.95% false-positive rate, and an average detection time of only 1 ms per model, significantly outperforming prior methods.

Yinbo Yu, Jing Fang, Xuewen Zhang +4

College of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210016, China · Shenzhen Research Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University, Shenzhen, Guangdong, 518057, China · School of Software, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710072, P.R. China +2

Clean Label Backdoor Attack Fewer Surprising Backdoors Threat Detection Unsupervised Detection Lightweight

May 16, 2026cs.CL

Exploring Lightweight Large Language Models for Court View Generation

Criminal Court View Generation (CVG) is a critical task in Legal Artificial Intelligence (Legal AI), involving the generation of court view based on case facts. In this work, we systematically explore the capabilities of lightweight (smaller than 2B) large language models (LLMs) in CVG and their impact on charge prediction. Our study addresses four key questions: (1) how does different architecture of LLMs affect the CVG quality and charge prediction. (2) how does LLMs size contribute to the performance, (3) how do lightweight LLMs compare with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in these tasks, and (4) how does predicting charge by court view generation first compare with predicting it directly. Additionally, we also develop CVGEvalKit, an evaluation framework including three public available datasets for CVG tasks, as well as predicting their charges. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on this framework, where models are trained on a mixed training set and evaluated on each dataset's test set. Experimental results provide new insights into the trade-offs between model architecture, model size, and the influence between different tasks, highlighting the potential of lightweight LLMs in judicial AI applications. The source code is anonymously available at \url{https://github.com/ZhitianHou/CVGEvalKit}

Zhitian Hou, Tianyong Hao, Nanli Zeng +2

School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University · School of Computer Science, South China Normal University · 3China Mobile Internet Co., Ltd.

Court Lightweight

May 15, 2026eess.SP

TFZ-Tree: An Ultra-Lightweight Waveform Classification Framework for Resource-Constrained Devices

Under the trend of multi-waveform coexistence in 6G IoT, intelligent receivers must first identify physical-layer waveform types before performing correct demodulation and resource scheduling. However, existing signal identification research largely focuses on symbol-level modulation classification. Research directly targeting physical-layer waveform types (e.g., OFDM, OTFS, LoRa) is not only extremely scarce but also heavily reliant on deep neural networks and complex time-frequency transforms, making deployment on resource-constrained terminals difficult. Symbol modulation classification methods themselves cannot circumvent the prerequisite of ``waveform identification first.'' To address this dual gap, we propose an ultra-lightweight waveform classification framework based on time-frequency multidimensional features with a cooperative Z-test tree (ZTree). The framework employs low-complexity time-domain feature extraction, and the classification backend adopts a ZTree optimized by Z-statistical testing, which uses hypothesis testing confidence to automatically control decision tree splitting and size, ensuring efficient execution on resource-limited processors. Tested on ten 6G candidate waveforms including OFDM, OTFS, DSSS, LoRa, and NB-IoT, the method achieves 99.5% average accuracy under AWGN and 87.4% under TDL-C multipath channels, with main confusion between OTFS and LoRa. Implemented in C on an x86 platform, single inference latency is under 4~ms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work achieving real-time recognition of ten IoT waveform types. Future work will target deployment acceleration on embedded MCUs. Code and dataset are open-sourced at: https://github.com/Einstein-sworder/IoT-wave.

Hao Wang, Kuang Zhang, Yonggang Chi +3

Waveforms Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing Resource-Constrained Edge Devices Lightweight Device

May 14, 2026cs.CV

MHSA: A Lightweight Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations via Steered Attention in LVLMs

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse multimodal tasks, yet they continue to suffer from hallucinations, generating content that is inconsistent with the visual input. Prior work DHCP (Detecting Hallucinations by Cross-modal Attention Pattern) has explored hallucination detection from the perspective of cross-modal attention, but does not address hallucination mitigation. In this paper, we propose MHSA (Mitigating Hallucinations via Steered Attention), a lightweight framework that mitigates hallucinations by learning to correct cross-modal attention patterns in LVLMs. MHSA trains a simple three-layer MLP generator to produce corrected attention, guided by supervisory signals from the DHCP discriminator and the LVLM itself. During inference, MHSA mitigates both discriminative and generative hallucinations across various datasets and LVLMs by simply replacing the original cross-modal attention with the corrected one, without modifying any LVLM parameters. By extending cross-modal attention mechanisms from hallucination detection to hallucination mitigation, MHSA offers a novel perspective on hallucination research in LVLMs and helps enhance their reliability.

Wei Ding, Yilin Li, Yudong Zhang +4

Tsinghua University Beijing, China · Tsinghua University, Tencent Beijing, China · Tencent Beijing, China +2

Hallucination Mitigation Generative Hallucination Cross-Modal Attention Lightweight

May 14, 2026cs.CV

Evo-Depth: A Lightweight Depth-Enhanced Vision-Language-Action Model

Vision-Language-Action models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation by unifying perception, language grounding, and action generation. However, they often struggle in scenarios requiring precise spatial understanding, as current VLA models primarily rely on 2D visual representations that lack depth information and detailed spatial relationships. While recent approaches incorporate explicit 3D inputs such as depth maps or point clouds to address this issue, they often increase system complexity, require additional sensors, and remain vulnerable to sensing noise and reconstruction errors. Another line of work explores implicit 3D-aware spatial modeling directly from RGB observations without extra sensors, but it often relies on large geometry foundation models, resulting in higher training and deployment costs. To address these challenges, we propose Evo-Depth, a lightweight depth-enhanced VLA framework that enhances spatially grounded manipulation without relying on additional sensing hardware or compromising deployment efficiency. Evo-Depth employs a lightweight Implicit Depth Encoding Module to extract compact depth features from multi-view RGB images. These features are incorporated into vision-language representations through a Spatial Enhancement Module via depth-aware modulation, enabling efficient spatial-semantic enhancement. A Progressive Alignment Training strategy is further introduced to align the resulting depth-enhanced representations with downstream action learning. With only 0.9B parameters, Evo-Depth achieves superior performance across four simulation benchmarks. In real-world experiments, Evo-Depth attains the highest average success rate while also exhibiting the smallest model size, lowest GPU memory usage, and highest inference frequency among compared methods.

Tao Lin, Yuxin Du, Jiting Liu +14

School of AI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · King Abdullah University of Science and Technology · SJTU-Quic Robot Joint Lab +1

Diffusion-Based Vision-Language-Actions Robotic Manipulation 3D Representation Lightweight Representation Learning Alphaevolve

May 13, 2026cs.CV

You Only Landmark Once: Lightweight U-Net Face Super Resolution with YOLO-World Landmark Heatmaps

Face image super-resolution aims to recover high-resolution facial images from severely degraded inputs. Under extreme upscaling factors, fine facial details are often lost, making accurate reconstruction challenging. Existing methods typically rely on heavy network architectures, adversarial training schemes, or separate alignment networks, increasing model complexity and computational cost. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight U-Net based-architecture designed to reconstructs

128{ \times }128

facial images from severely degraded

16{ \times }16

inputs, achieving an

8 \times

magnification. A key contribution is a novel auxiliary-training-free supervision strategy that leverages heatmaps generated by YOLO-World, an open-vocabulary object detector, to localize key facial features such as eyes, nose, and mouth. These heatmaps are converted into spatial weights to form a heatmap-guided loss that emphasizes reconstruction errors in semantically important regions. Unlike prior methods that require dedicated landmark or alignment networks, our approach directly reuses detector outputs as supervision, maintaining an efficient training and inference pipeline. Experiments on the aligned CelebA dataset demonstrate that the proposed loss consistently improves quantitative metrics and produces sharper, more realistic reconstructions. Overall, our results show that lightweight networks can effectively exploit detection-driven priors for perceptually convincing extreme upscaling, without adversarial training or increased computational cost.

Riccardo Carraro, Anna Briotto, Endi Hysa +2

University of Padua, Padua, Italy

Upsampling Yolo26 Feature Pyramid Resnet-18 Object Detection Lightweight+3

May 9, 2026cs.CV

LightAVSeg: Lightweight Audio-Visual Segmentation

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) targets pixel level localization of sounding emitting objects in videos. However, existing models rely on dense cross-modal attention with quadratic computational cost, limiting their suitability for resource efficient deployment. Most efficiency oriented methods focus on backbone reduction and overlook the interaction module as the primary bottleneck. This paper proposes LightAVSeg, a lightweight framework that replaces heavy attention with a decoupled design for semantic filtering and spatial grounding, resulting in interaction costs that scale linearly with spatial resolution. Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary alignment loss to enforce semantic consistency during training with zero inference overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LightAVSeg achieves a new state-of-the-art among lightweight methods: with 20.5M parameters ~1/7 of AVSegFormer), it reaches 50.4 mIoU on the MS3 benchmark and enables efficient inference on a mobile processor.

Qing Zhong, Guodong Ding, Lingqiao Liu +3

College of Informatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China · School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore · School of Computer Science, Adelaide University, Australia +2

Video Object Segmentation Cross-Modal Attention Lightweight Representation-Alignment Loss

May 7, 2026cs.LG

TFM-Retouche: A Lightweight Input-Space Adapter for Tabular Foundation Models

Tabular foundation models (TFMs), such as TabPFN-2.6, TabICLv2, ConTextTab, Mitra, LimiX, and TabDPT, achieve strong zero-shot performance through in-context learning, but their inductive biases remain fixed at inference time. Adapting a pretrained TFM to a specific dataset or task typically requires either full fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive, or parameter-efficient tuning methods (PEFT) such as LoRA, which must be tailored to the internal architecture of each TFM. Furthermore, the evidence on whether weight-space fine-tuning improves accuracy or calibration is mixed \citep{tanna_exploring_2026,rubachev_finetuning_2025}. We introduce TFM-Retouche, a lightweight input-space residual adapter that is architecture-agnostic by design with respect to the frozen TFM backbone. TFM-Retouche learns a small residual correction in the input space to align the input data with the inductive biases of the pretrained model. The adapter is trained end-to-end through the frozen TFM, with a post-training identity guard that falls back to the unmodified TFM whenever adaptation does not help on held-out validation. On TabArena-Lite (51 datasets spanning binary classification, multiclass classification, and regression), TabICLv2-Retouche -- the framework instantiated on TabICLv2 -- is the top-ranked method on the leaderboard with light per-task tuning and ensembling, lifting aggregate Elo by +56 over the frozen TabICLv2 base and sitting on the Pareto front of predictive quality versus both training and inference time.

Duong Nguyen, Mohammed Jawhar, Nicolas Chesneau

Ekimetrics

Tabular Foundation Models Lightweight Image Editing

May 6, 2026cs.CV

Lightweight Cross-Spectral Face Recognition via Contrastive Alignment and Distillation

Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR) aims at matching face images captured across different sensing modalities, such as thermal-to-visible or near-infrared-to-visible, enhancing the usability of face recognition systems in challenging real-world conditions. Although recent HFR methods have achieved significant improvements in performance, many rely on computationally expensive models, making them impractical for deployment on resource-limited edge devices. In this work, we introduce a lightweight yet effective HFR framework by adapting a hybrid CNN-Transformer model originally developed for RGB homogeneous face recognition. Our approach enables efficient end-to-end training with only a small amount of paired heterogeneous data, while still maintaining strong performance on standard RGB face recognition benchmarks. This makes it suitable for both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. Comprehensive experiments on several challenging HFR and face recognition benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance while keeping computational requirements low.

Anjith George, Sebastien Marcel

Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland · Université de Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland

Face Recognition Model Hybrid Transformer Contrastive Alignment Lightweight

May 6, 2026cs.CV

SAMIC: A Lightweight Semantic-Aware Mamba for Efficient Perceptual Image Compression

Perceptual image compression focuses on preserving high visual quality under low-bitrate constraints. Most existing approaches to perceptual compression leverage the strong generative capabilities of generative adversarial networks or diffusion models, at the cost of substantial model complexity. To this end, we present an efficient perceptual image compression method that exploits the long-range modeling capability and linear computational complexity of state space models, with a particular focus on Mamba. Unlike existing methods that rely on an inherently fixed scanning order and consequently impair semantic continuity and spatial correlation, we develop a semantic-aware Mamba block (SAMB) to enable scanning guided by dynamically clustered semantic features, thereby alleviating the strict causality constraints and long-range information decay inherent to Mamba. Inspired by singular value decomposition, we design an SVD-inspired redundancy reduction module (SVD-RRM) that performs a low-rank approximation on the latent features by introducing a learnable soft threshold, leading to channel-wise redundancy information reduction. The proposed SAMB is integrated into both the encoder and decoder of the compression framework, whereas the SVD-RRM is incorporated only in the encoder. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches in terms of rate-distortion-perception tradeoff and model complexity. The source code and pretrained models will be available at https://github.com/Jasmine-aiq/SAMIC.

Jiaqian Zhang, Hao Wei, Chenyang Ge +1

State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China · School of Information and Communication Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

Learned Image Compression Mamba-Based Models Generative Adversarial Network Long-Range Coherence Lightweight

May 1, 2026cs.CV

Make Your LVLM KV Cache More Lightweight

Key-Value (KV) cache has become a de facto component of modern Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for inference. While it enhances decoding efficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs), its direct adoption in LVLMs introduces substantial GPU memory overhead due to the large number of vision tokens processed during the prefill stage. To tackle this problem, we propose LightKV, a novel approach that reduces KV cache size by exploiting the redundancy among vision-token embeddings. Guided by text prompts, LightKV employs cross-modality message passing to aggregate informative messages across vision tokens and progressively compress them during prefill. This prompt-aware guidance distinguishes our method from prior vision-only compression strategies. We evaluate LightKV on eight open-source LVLMs across eight public benchmark datasets, e.g., MME and SeedBench. Experimental results demonstrate that with only 55% of the original vision tokens, LightKV (a) halves the vision-token KV cache size, (b) reduces computation by up to 40%, and (c) preserves general-purpose performance while significantly outperforming existing baselines.

Xihao Chen, Yangyang Guo, Roger Zimmermann

Integrative Sciences and Engineering Programme, National University of Singapore · School of Computing, National University of Singapore

Depthweave-Kv Recent Vision-Language Models Cache Lightweight

May 1, 2026cs.CV

BOLT: Online Lightweight Adaptation for Preparation-Free Heterogeneous Cooperative Perception

Most existing heterogeneous cooperative perception methods depend on prior preparation like offline joint training or tailored collaborator-model adaptation. Such preprocessing is, however, generally impractical in real scenarios, as agents are usually independently trained by different developers and meet occasionally online. This work investigates \emph{preparation-free heterogeneous cooperative perception}, where agents use independently trained single-agent detectors without any pre-deployment coordination. We find direct cross-agent fusion under this setting greatly underperforms ego-only perception. We present BOLT, a lightweight plug-and-play module that adapts neighboring features online via ego-as-teacher distillation, requiring only ego predictions without ground-truth labels. BOLT leverages high-confidence ego perception features to guide cross-agent feature-domain alignment, while enabling neighbors to contribute features in the ego's low-confidence regions. With only 0.9M trainable parameters, BOLT improves AP@50 by up to 32.3 points over vanilla unadapted fusion in the preparation-free setting. It consistently outperforms ego-only results on DAIR-V2X and OPV2V, across different encoder pairs and fusion strategies. Code: https://github.com/sidiangongyuan/BOLT.

Kang Yang, Tianci Bu, Peng Wang +2

Renmin University of China · National University of Defense Technology

Collaborative Perception Lightweight

Apr 29, 2026cs.CL

HalluCiteChecker: A Lightweight Toolkit for Hallucinated Citation Detection and Verification in the Era of AI Scientists

We introduce HalluCiteChecker, a toolkit for detecting and verifying hallucinated citations in scientific papers. While AI assistant technologies have transformed the academic writing process, including citation recommendation, they have also led to the emergence of hallucinated citations that do not correspond to any existing work. Such citations not only undermine the credibility of scientific papers but also impose an additional burden on reviewers and authors, who must manually verify their validity during the review process. In this study, we formalize hallucinated citation detection as an NLP task and provide a corresponding toolkit as a practical foundation for addressing this problem. Our package is lightweight and can perform verification in seconds on a standard laptop. It can also be executed entirely offline and runs efficiently using only CPUs. We hope that HalluCiteChecker will help reduce reviewer workload and support organizers by enabling systematic pre-review and publication checks. Our code is released under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub and is distributed as an installable package via PyPI. A demonstration video is available on YouTube.

Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe

Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan

Citations Peer Review Reviewer Citation Hallucination Artificial Intelligence Scientists Lightweight

Apr 25, 2026cs.CV

Lightweight and Production-Ready PDF Visual Element Parsing

PDF documents contain critical visual elements such as figures, tables, and forms whose accurate extraction is essential for document understanding and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Existing PDF parsers often miss complex visuals, extract non-informative artifacts (e.g., watermarks, logos), produce fragmented elements, and fail to reliably associate captions with their corresponding elements, which degrades downstream retrieval and question answering. We present a lightweight and production level PDF parsing framework that can accurately detect visual elements and associates captions using a combination of spatial heuristics, layout analysis, and semantic similarity. On popular benchmark datasets and internal product data, the proposed solution achieves

\geq96\%

visual element detection accuracy and

93\%

caption association accuracy. When used as a preprocessing step for multimodal RAG, it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art parsers and large vision-language models on both internal data and the MMDocRAG benchmark, while reducing latency by over

2\times

. We have deployed the proposed system in challenging production environment.

Meizhu Liu, Yassi Abbasi, Matthew Rowe +2

Oracle AI

Document Parsing Visual Document Retrieval Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation Lightweight

Apr 24, 2026eess.IV

Selective Depthwise Separable Convolution for Lightweight Joint Source-Channel Coding in Wireless Image Transmission

Depthwise separable convolutional (DSConv) layers have been successfully applied to deep learning (DL)-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC) schemes to reduce computational complexity. However, a systematic investigation of the layerwise and ratio-wise replacement of standard convolutional (Conv) layers with DSConv layers in JSCC systems for wireless image transmission remains largely unexplored. In this letter, we propose a configurable lightweight JSCC framework that incorporates a selective replacement strategy, enabling flexible Conv-to-DSConv replacement at different replacement ratios and positions. By varying the replacement ratio, we obtain models with different computational complexities and analyze their impact on reconstruction performance. Furthermore, we investigate how replacements at different encoder and decoder depths influence reconstruction quality under a fixed replacement ratio. Our results show that Conv-to-DSConv replacement at the intermediate layers of the encoder and decoder achieves a favorable complexity-performance trade-off, revealing layer-wise redundancy in DL-based JSCC systems. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves substantial parameter reduction with only slight performance degradation, enabling flexible complexity-performance trade-offs for resource-constrained edge devices.

Ming Ye, Kui Cai, Cunhua Pan +3

Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore 487372 · National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China · School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China

Source-Channel Coding Resnet-18 Lightweight

Apr 23, 2026cs.CL

An End-to-End Ukrainian RAG for Local Deployment. Optimized Hybrid Search and Lightweight Generation

This paper presents a highly efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system built specifically for Ukrainian document question answering, which achieved 2nd place in the UNLP 2026 Shared Task. Our solution features a custom two-stage search pipeline that retrieves relevant document pages, paired with a specialized Ukrainian language model fine-tuned on synthetic data to generate accurate, grounded answers. Finally, we compress the model for lightweight deployment. Evaluated under strict computational limits, our architecture demonstrates that high-quality, verifiable AI question answering can be achieved locally on resource-constrained hardware without sacrificing accuracy.

Mykola Trokhymovych, Yana Oliinyk, Nazarii Nyzhnyk

Pompeu Fabra University · Independent Researcher

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Ukrainian Lightweight

Apr 21, 2026cs.CV

Optimizing Data Augmentation for Real-Time Small UAV Detection: A Lightweight Context-Aware Approach

Visual detection of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a critical task in surveillance systems due to their small physical size and environmental challenges. Although deep learning models have achieved significant progress, deploying them on edge devices necessitates the use of lightweight models, such as YOLOv11 Nano, which possess limited learning capacity. In this research, an efficient and context-aware data augmentation pipeline, combining Mosaic strategies and HSV color-space adaptation, is proposed to enhance the performance of these models. Experimental results on four standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach, compared to heavy and instance-level methods like Copy-Paste, not only prevents the generation of synthetic artifacts and overfitting but also significantly improves mean Average Precision (mAP) across all scenarios. Furthermore, the evaluation of generalization capability under foggy conditions revealed that the proposed method offers the optimal balance between Precision and stability for real-time systems, whereas alternative methods, such as MixUp, are effective only in specific applications.

Amir Zamani, Zeinab Abedini

Comprehensive University of the Islamic Revolution · Department of Computer Engineering · Tehran, Iran +1

Drone Detection Yolo26 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Data Augmentation Lightweight Mosaic

Apr 20, 2026cs.CV

ReCap: Lightweight Referential Grounding for Coherent Story Visualization

Story Visualization aims to generate a sequence of images that faithfully depicts a textual narrative that preserve character identity, spatial configuration, and stylistic coherence as the narratives unfold. Maintaining such cross-frame consistency has traditionally relied on explicit memory banks, architectural expansion, or auxiliary language models, resulting in substantial parameter growth and inference overhead. We introduce ReCap, a lightweight consistency framework that improves character stability and visual fidelity without modifying the base diffusion backbone. ReCap's CORE (COnditional frame REferencing) module treats anaphors, in our case pronouns, as visual anchors, activating only when characters are referred to by a pronoun and conditioning on the preceding frame to propagate visual identity. This selective design avoids unconditional cross-frame conditioning and introduces only 149K additional parameters, a fraction of the cost of memory-bank and LLM-augmented approaches. To further stabilize identity, we incorporate SemDrift (Guided Semantic Drift Correction) applied only during training. When text is vague or referential, the denoiser lacks a visual anchor for identity-defining attributes, causing character appearance to drift across frames, SemDrift corrects this by aligning denoiser representations with pretrained DINOv3 visual embeddings, enforcing semantic identity stability at zero inference cost. ReCap outperforms previous state-of-the-art, StoryGPT-V, on the two main benchmarks for story visualization by 2.63% Character-Accuracy on FlintstonesSV and by 5.65% on PororoSV, establishing a new state-of-the-art character consistency on both benchmarks. Furthermore, we extend story visualization to human-centric narratives derived from real films, demonstrating the capability of ReCap beyond stylized cartoon domains.

Aditya Arora, Akshita Gupta, Pau Rodriguez +1

Technical University of Darmstadt & hessian.AI, Germany

Video Storytelling Lightweight

Apr 18, 2026cs.RO

Time-Division Multiplexing Actuation in Tendon-Driven Arms: Lightweight Design and Fault Tolerance

Robotic manipulators for aerospace applications require a delicate balance between lightweight construction and fault-tolerant operation to satisfy strict weight limitations and ensure reliability in remote, hazardous environments. This paper presents Time-Division Multiplexing Actuation (TDMA), a practical approach for tendon-driven robots that significantly reduces actuator count while preserving high torque output and intrinsic fault tolerance. The key hardware employs a vertically-stacked rotational selection structure that integrates self-rotating TDM motors for rapid configuration, electromagnetic clutches enabling sub-0.1 second engagement, a worm gear reducer for enhanced load capacity and self-locking capability, and a dual-encoder system for precise, long-term positioning. Leveraging TDMA, the proposed MuxArm achieves a self-weight of 2.17 kg, supports an actuator driving capacity of 10 kg, and maintains end-effector accuracy up to 1% of its length, even under partial servo failure. Additionally, an actuation space trajectory planning algorithm is developed, enabling fault-tolerant control and reducing tendon load by up to 50% compared to conventional methods. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate MuxArm's robust performance in diverse settings, including free-space, cluttered, and confined environments.

Shoujie Li, Changqing Guo, Jianle Xu +4

Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China · School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639956, Singapore · Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Robotic Manipulator Fault Tolerance Lightweight Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing

Apr 17, 2026cs.CV

SSFT: A Lightweight Spectral-Spatial Fusion Transformer for Generic Hyperspectral Classification

Hyperspectral imaging enables fine-grained recognition of materials by capturing rich spectral signatures, but learning robust classifiers is challenging due to high dimensionality, spectral redundancy, limited labeled data, and strong domain shifts. Beyond earth observation, labeled HSI data is often scarce and imbalanced, motivating compact models for generic hyperspectral classification across diverse acquisition regimes. We propose the lightweight Spectral-Spatial Fusion Transformer (SSFT), which factorizes representation learning into spectral and spatial pathways and integrates them via cross-attention to capture complementary wavelength-dependent and structural information. We evaluate our SSFT on the challenging HSI-Benchmark, a heterogeneous multi-dataset benchmark covering earth observation, fruit condition assessment, and fine-grained material recognition. SSFT achieves state-of-the-art overall performance, ranking first while using less than 2% of the parameters of the previous leading method. We further evaluate transfer to the substantially larger SpectralEarth benchmark under the official protocol, where SSFT remains competitive despite its compact size. Ablation studies show that both spectral and spatial pathways are crucial, with spatial modeling contributing most, and that SSFT remains robust without data augmentation.

Alexander Musiat, Nikolas Ebert, Oliver Wasenmüller

Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Hyperspectral Image Two-Level Spatial-Frequency Fusion Strategy Spatio-Temporal Transformers Image Classification Fine-Grained Perception Large-Scale Benchmark+1

Mar 10, 2026cs.CL

EnComp: Lightweight Encoder-Only Context Compression for Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering

Efficient context compression is critical for retrieval-augmented question answering in resource-constrained settings, where long retrieved contexts increase latency, memory use, and LLM reader cost. We propose a lightweight encoder-only framework for query-driven sentence pruning that preserves answer-critical evidence while aggressively reducing irrelevant context. Our method learns marginal contribution scores for sentences using counterfactual training signals and optimizes a contrastive ranking objective that separates critical evidence from noncritical context. Our approach scores all sentences from a single full-context encoding, enabling fast inference with low computational overhead. Experiments show that it maintains accuracy comparable to the strongest baseline while using 3.7

\times

less peak memory and achieving nearly 3

\times

lower compression latency, demonstrating an effective quality--efficiency trade-off for practical resource-constrained deployment.

Thao Do, Dinh Phu Tran, An Vo +2

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 34141, South Korea

Question-Answering Benchmarks Data Compression Methods LLM Inference Optimization Visual Token Pruning Lightweight Contributions

Feb 13, 2026cs.LG

High-Resolution Climate Projections Using Diffusion-Based Downscaling of a Lightweight Climate Emulator

The proliferation of data-driven models in weather and climate sciences has marked a significant paradigm shift, with advanced models demonstrating exceptional skill in medium-range forecasting. However, these models are often limited by long-term instabilities, climatological drift, and substantial computational costs during training and inference, restricting their broader application for climate studies. Addressing these limitations, Guan et al. (2024) introduced LUCIE, a lightweight, physically consistent climate emulator utilizing a Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) architecture. This model is able to reproduce accurate long-term statistics including climatological mean and seasonal variability. However, LUCIE's native resolution (~300 km) is inadequate for detailed regional impact assessments. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a deep learning-based downscaling framework, leveraging probabilistic diffusion-based generative models with conditional and posterior sampling frameworks. These models downscale coarse LUCIE outputs to 25 km resolution. They are trained on approximately 14,000 ERA5 timesteps spanning 2000-2009 and evaluated on LUCIE predictions from 2010 to 2020. Model performance is assessed through diverse metrics, including latitude-averaged RMSE, power spectrum, probability density functions and First Empirical Orthogonal Function of the zonal wind. We observe that the proposed approach is able to preserve the coarse-grained dynamics from LUCIE while generating fine-scaled climatological statistics at ~28km resolution.

Haiwen Guan, Dibyajyoti Chakraborty, Moein Darman +3

1Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania · Department of Applied Mathematics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California · 3Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), Seattle, Washington +1

Dynamical Downscaling Wind Lightweight Fourier Neural Operators Projection

Dec 23, 2025cs.SD

EnvSSLAM-FFN: Lightweight Layer-Fused System for ESDD 2026 Challenge

Recent advances in generative audio models have enabled high-fidelity environmental sound synthesis, raising serious concerns for audio security. The ESDD 2026 Challenge therefore addresses environmental sound deepfake detection under unseen generators (Track 1) and black-box low-resource detection (Track 2) conditions. We propose EnvSSLAM-FFN, which integrates a frozen SSLAM self-supervised encoder with a lightweight FFN back-end. To effectively capture spoofing artifacts under severe data imbalance, we fuse intermediate SSLAM representations from layers 4-9 and adopt a class-weighted training objective. Experimental results show that the proposed system consistently outperforms the official baselines on both tracks, achieving Test Equal Error Rates (EERs) of 1.20% and 1.05%, respectively.

Xiaoxuan Guo, Hengyan Huang, Jiayi Zhou +5

State Key Laboratory of Media Convergence and Communication, Communication University of China, Beijing, China · Machine Intelligence, Ant Group, Shanghai, China · Key Laboratory of Media Audio & Video, Ministry of Education, Communication University of China, Beijing, China

Environmental Sound Deepfake Detection Direct Feature Fusion Lightweight Challenges Orb-Slam2

Dec 19, 2025cs.CV

YolovN-CBi: A Lightweight and Efficient Architecture for Real-Time Detection of Small UAVs

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as, drones pose increasing risks in civilian and defense settings, demanding accurate and real-time drone detection systems. However, detecting drones is challenging because of their small size, rapid movement, and low visual contrast. A modified architecture of YolovN called the YolovN-CBi is proposed that incorporates the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and the Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) to improve sensitivity to small object detections. A curated training dataset consisting of 28K images is created with various flying objects and a local test dataset is collected with 2500 images consisting of very small drone objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated on four benchmark datasets, along with the local test dataset. The baseline Yolov5 and the proposed Yolov5-CBi architecture outperform newer Yolo versions, including Yolov8 and Yolov12, in the speed-accuracy trade-off for small object detection. Four other variants of the proposed CBi architecture are also proposed and evaluated, which vary in the placement and usage of CBAM and BiFPN. These variants are further distilled using knowledge distillation techniques for edge deployment, using a Yolov5m-CBi teacher and a Yolov5n-CBi student. The distilled model achieved a mA@P0.5:0.9 of 0.6573, representing a 6.51% improvement over the teacher's score of 0.6171, highlighting the effectiveness of the distillation process. The distilled model is 82.9% faster than the baseline model, making it more suitable for real-time drone detection. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed CBi architecture, together with the distilled lightweight models in advancing efficient and accurate real-time detection of small UAVs.

Ami Pandat, Punna Rajasekhar, Gopika Vinod +1

Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai, 400094, Maharashtra, India. · Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Mumbai, 400094, Maharashtra, India.

Drone Detection Yolo26 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Convolutional Block Attention Module Lightweight

Sep 28, 2025cs.LG

ADAPT: Lightweight, Long-Range Machine Learning Force Fields Without Graphs

Point defects play a central role in driving the properties of materials. First-principles methods are widely used to compute defect energetics and structures, including at scale for high-throughput defect databases. However, these methods are computationally expensive, making machine-learning force fields (MLFFs) an attractive alternative for accelerating structural relaxations. Most existing MLFFs are based on graph neural networks (GNNs), which can suffer from oversmoothing, oversquashing, and poor representation of long-range interactions. Both of these issues are especially of concern when modeling point defects. To address these challenges, we introduce the \textit{Accelerated Deep Atomic Potential Transformer} (ADAPT), an MLFF that replaces graph representations with a direct coordinates-in-space formulation and explicitly considers all pairwise atomic interactions. Atoms are treated as tokens, with a Transformer encoder modeling their interactions. Applied to a dataset of silicon point defects, ADAPT achieves a roughly 22% reduction in force and a roughly 40 percent reduction in energy prediction error relative to a state-of-the-art GNN-based model, while requiring only a fraction of the computational cost.

Evan Dramko, Yihuang Xiong, Yizhi Zhu +4

Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA · Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA · Department of Materials Science and Nanoengineering, Rice University, Houston, TX, USA +2

First-Principles Calculation Photonic Transformer Accelerators Force Lightweight

Aug 4, 2025cs.CL

Knowing When Not to Answer: Lightweight KB-Aligned OOD Detection for Safe RAG

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, where safety depends not only on how a system answers, but also on whether a query should be answered given a knowledge base (KB). Out-of-domain (OOD) queries can cause dense retrieval to surface weakly related context and lead the generator to produce fluent but unjustified responses. We study lightweight, KB-aligned OOD detection as an always-on gate for RAG systems. Our approach applies PCA to KB embeddings and scores queries in a compact subspace selected either by explained-variance retention (EVR) or by a separability-driven t-test ranking. We evaluate geometric semantic-search rules and lightweight classifiers across 16 domains, including high-stakes COVID-19 and Substance Use KBs, and stress-test robustness using both LLM-generated attacks and an in-the-wild 4chan attack. We find that low-dimensional detectors achieve competitive OOD performance while being faster, cheaper, and more interpretable than prompted LLM-based judges. Finally, human and LLM-based evaluations show that OOD queries primarily degrade the relevance of RAG outputs, showing the need for efficient external OOD detection to maintain safe, in-scope behavior.

Ilias Triantafyllopoulos, Renyi Qu, Salvatore Giorgi +3

New York University · Microsoft · University of Pennsylvania +1

Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Out-Of-Distribution Detection High-Stakes Domains Text Embeddings Lightweight

May 6, 2025cs.CV

Comparative Analysis of Lightweight CNNs for Resource-Constrained Devices: Predictive Performance, Efficiency Trade-offs, and Initialization Effects

Lightweight convolutional neural networks are often compared using results obtained with different training recipes, input settings, and pretrained checkpoints. Such differences make architecture rankings difficult to interpret. This study presents a controlled benchmark of seven established CNNs across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet under a shared fine tuning protocol. The evaluation reports top-1 accuracy, macro F1, top-5 accuracy, parameter count, FP32 parameter storage, and multiply accumulate operations. EfficientNetV2-S records the highest observed top-1 accuracy on all three datasets, reaching 97.57%, 86.98%, and 78.73%. EfficientNet-B0 remains within 0.85 percentage points of EfficientNetV2-S across the three datasets while requiring only about 21% of its parameters and 14% of its multiply accumulate operations on Tiny ImageNet. It therefore offers a favorable general balance between predictive performance and computational demand. MobileNetV3-Small is a strong candidate for ultra low resource settings. It uses about 40% of the parameters and 15% of the multiply accumulate operations of EfficientNet-B0 while retaining competitive accuracy. A matched comparison of ImageNet pretrained and randomly initialized EfficientNet-B0 and MobileNetV3-Small models shows that the pretrained advantage is substantially larger on CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet than on CIFAR-10 under the fixed protocol. The results provide a focused reference for selecting established lightweight CNNs when predictive quality, parameter storage, and theoretical computation must be considered together.

Tasnim Shahriar

Independent Researcher

Mobilenetv2 Efficientnet Encoder Convolutional Neural Networks Neural Network Inference Resource-Constrained Edge Devices Imagenet+2

Date pendingcs.AI

A Lightweight Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Concrete Barrier Design

The design of reinforced concrete (RC) highway barriers is a safety-critical engineering task that requires strict compliance with regulatory provisions such as the AASHTO LRFD Bridge Design Specifications. Current engineering practice relies largely on manual, iterative, and experience-driven procedures to satisfy complex material, geometric, and mechanical constraints. Although standalone large language models (LLMs) show strong capabilities in knowledge representation and text generation, their direct use in structural engineering design is limited by hallucination, numerical reasoning errors, and insufficient integration with physics-based analysis. To address these limitations, this study proposes a "generation-validation-modification" closed-loop framework for automated RC barrier design based on the multi-agent orchestration capability of AutoGen. The framework integrates specialized agents for parameter generation, mechanics-based calculation, target-interval evaluation, deviation diagnosis, and rule-based design modification. The multi-agent framework (MAF) was evaluated on three barrier testing levels (TL-3, TL-4, and TL-5) using sixty RC barrier designs with different geometric configurations. Three DeepSeek models with different parameter scales, DS-8B, DS-32B, and DS-671B, were investigated. All designs were evaluated according to Section 13 of the AASHTO LRFD Bridge Design Specifications, 10th Edition (2024). Results show that MAF-DS-8B achieves a target-interval compliance rate of 98.3%, while the best-performing standalone LLM, DS-32B, achieves 11.7%. These results demonstrate that multi-agent architectures can improve the reliability, interpretability, and accessibility of AI-assisted engineering design for practical applications.

Wanting Wang, Xiye Ma, Yuyang He +1

College of Civil Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, China

Engineering Automated Heuristic Design Missing Bridge Multi-Agent Communication Lightweight

Date pendingcs.CV

FreeTransformSR: Efficient Lightweight Image Super-Resolution via Free Low-Rank Learnable Transform

Single image super-resolution aims to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs. This paper proposes FreeTransformSR, a novel lightweight super-resolution network based on a channel-wise free low-rank learnable transform. The transform learns task-adaptive basis functions in a data-driven manner, enabling adaptive feature modulation with minimal parameter overhead. To further enhance high-frequency detail recovery, we introduce a local feature modulation branch that complements transform-domain processing with depthwise convolution. In addition, a soft complexity adaptive module dynamically fuses the outputs of local convolution and window self-attention branches through a lightweight gating network, adaptively adjusting the fusion ratio based on regional texture characteristics. An adaptive intensity modulation strategy is also incorporated to adjust transform-domain response strength at the sample level, enabling the network to dynamically adjust processing intensity according to input features. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that FreeTransformSR achieves competitive PSNR/SSIM performance with significantly fewer parameters and FLOPs. Specifically, FreeTransformSR achieves 32.41 dB on BSD100 x2 and 27.00 dB on Urban100 x4 with only 595K parameters, while delivering faster inference speed than competing methods, making it well-suited for deployment in resource-constrained scenarios. Source code is available at: https://github.com/HJiLi/FreeTransformSR.

Hongji Li, Yunhui Li

Chinese Academy of Sciences Changchun Institute of Optics Fine Mechanics and Physics, Changchun, Jilin 130033, China · University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Real-World Image Super-Resolution Fourier Lightweight Transform

Date pendingcs.CV

Uni-Light: An Ultra-Lightweight Framework via Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Brain Tumour Segmentation

Accurate 3D brain tumour segmentation from multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Existing brain tumour segmentation methods often suffer from heavy computational demands, while current lightweight architectures frequently lack the capacity to maintain segmentation fidelity in complex tumour regions. To address these issues, we propose a novel ultra-lightweight framework (Uni-Light) that achieves high-fidelity segmentation with substantially reduced computational overhead. It combines multi-scale convolutions with an uncertainty-aware knowledge distillation scheme that directs the student model toward hard-to-classify regions, complemented by a Signed Distance Field boundary loss for geometric constraints. Experimental results on BraTS2023-GLI and MSD-BTS datasets demonstrate that Uni-Light reduces parameters by 97.56%, floating-point operations (FLOPs) by 73.03%, and inference memory footprint by 81.58%, while surpassing the state-of-the-art model by an average of 1.47% in Dice score, offering a highly competitive trade-off between segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency in resource-constrained clinical settings. This work also advances data engineering for medical imaging by demonstrating that teacher model uncertainty can be exploited as a data-driven supervisory signal, re-prioritising the training data distribution without requiring additional annotation.

Libing Kuang, Soren Salehi, Ziling Wu +2

School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK · Electrical Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran · University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Brain Tumor Segmentation Magnetic Resonance Imaging U-Net Lightweight Fidelity