Localization

Voice-cloning fraud increasingly relies on surgical injection: a genuine conversation in which only one or two sentences are replaced by synthetic speech. Utterance-level deepfake detectors emit a single real/fake label per clip and cannot report where the synthetic speech lies. We formalise this as Temporal Deepfake Localisation in Multi-Speaker Conversations (TDLMC), show that equal error rate and min-DCF are ill-posed once a file contains both classes, and propose temporal metrics for this regime. Our contribution is a training-free five-stage pipeline that wraps a frozen binary detector and adds segment-level output with no retraining, using a two-threshold hysteresis finitestate-machine decoder to turn noisy window scores into coherent intervals. On 180 constructed multi-speaker conversations from ASVspoof 5, the system attains temporal intersection-over-union 0.90, temporal detection rate 0.95, and MS-DCF 0.26 with a strong backbone, and its false-alarm rate on genuine speech is below 6%, falling under 2% on genuine real multi-speaker dialogue (AMI). Under an identical pipeline, a trained localiser improves temporal IoU by only about 0.04, bounding the cost of forgoing supervision. Evaluated across three frozen detectors under one decoder whose constants are selected on a held-out calibration split, and with a controlled analysis attributing the residual false-alarm rate to a backbone domain gap rather than to the decoder, this provides the first zero-shot baseline and a reusable benchmark for TDLMC.

Solving repository-level code tasks requires LLM-based agents to use code search tools to navigate large codebases and identify a small set of relevant files and functions. However, current retrieval tools typically return flat lists of isolated code snippets: such lists can surface relevant files, but provide insufficient structure for agents to distinguish the target function from semantically similar alternatives in the same file. We introduce RepoNav, a lightweight post-retrieval interface that reorganizes retrieved snippets into a file-centered navigation scaffold. By presenting compact structural cues and candidate targets, this scaffold guides on-demand file-structure browsing, helping agents compare sibling symbols before selecting a target function. Across diverse models on LocBench, RepoNav improves function-level localization and narrows the file-to-function gap. Controlled ablations demonstrate that these gains come from structured evidence organization rather than simply exposing additional file structure, and the approach also improves performance on a repository-level question-answering benchmark.

Global welfare often depends on the correct interpretation of aerial and satellite imagery. Acting on such imagery (mapping flooded ground, crop extent, or damaged infrastructure) demands pixel-level segmentation to ensure perfect class localization. Pretrained general foundation models, when applied directly, often miss important features and cannot always find all the classes belonging to a given scene, overlooking smaller objects that matter most. We use a single consumer-grade GPU running a vision-language model (VLM) to supply this missing guidance, improving segmentation while producing structured, auditable evidence that drives the result and can be inspected on its own. We fuse three approaches: the frozen foundation model that labels every pixel, and two queries to a VLM, one to choose the classes that matter, and one to locate the small objects the base model misses. Evaluating across four aerial datasets, we see consistent gains at each stage where the base model is competent.

Generalized Visual Grounding (GVG) task aims to localize targets in an image based on referring expressions, extends the classical visual grounding paradigm by integrating multi-target and non-target scenarios. Previous methods typically rely on global semantic matching or coarse-grained region interactions for localization, where the discriminative cues are primarily derived from sentence-level semantics or regional context. In complex multi-target scenarios, such approaches tend to confuse visually similar targets, making it difficult to establish stable instance-level decision boundaries. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel Semantic-Spatial Discriminability Enhancement (SSDE) framework for generalized visual grounding, which aims to enhance the discriminative ability on fine-grained semantics and spatial localization, improving both cross-modal understanding and instance-level grounding. Specifically, to enhance the semantic discriminability of query representations at the fine-grained level, we propose a Semantic Discriminability Enhancement (SeDE) module, which leverages spatially guided cross-attention to disentangle fine-grained target-relevant visual attributes and integrates them with the textual subject semantics. Furthermore, to strengthen the spatial discriminability of the referred targets, we introduce a Spatial Discriminability Enhancement (SpDE) module, which models an instance center density map to characterize the spatial distribution of targets, and explicitly constructs instance separation structures in the spatial domain by employing them as an auxiliary supervision signal. Extensive experiments show that SSDE achieves superior performance on ten datasets across both classic and generalized visual grounding tasks.

Localizing issue-relevant code regions is a critical step in automated software engineering. However, due to their reliance on sparse trajectory-level signals, existing methods cannot identify which per-turn actions are effective and often discover correct code regions during exploration but fail to commit them. To address these limitations, we propose an action-aware reinforcement learning method that combines a per-turn reward sequence rewarding both the discovery and commitment of gold code regions with an action-level advantage estimation scheme that isolates each action's credit by grouping turns sharing the same exploration context. Extensive evaluations show that our method improves the average F1 over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 1.58% on SWE-Bench Verified and 8.55% on SWE-Bench Pro, with our 4B model outperforming baselines up to 8x larger. Our code is available at https://github.com/donian00/A2Agent.

We present SynCrash, a multi-stage pipeline for zero-shot accident detection, spatial localization, and collision-type classification in fixed-view CCTV surveillance video. Our approach addresses the ACCIDENT at CVPR 2026 Challenge, which requires predicting when an accident occurs, where in the frame the impact happens, and what type of collision it is, all without access to labeled real-world training data. The pipeline operates in three decoupled stages: (1) Temporal localization via a VideoMAEv2-giant backbone fine-tuned on CARLA-based synthetic clips with metadata-aware embeddings and dense sliding-window inference; (2) Spatial localization using YOLO for object detection combined with a physics-informed hybrid heuristic that leverages bounding-box overlap and trajectory-based reasoning to predict the impact point; and (3) Collision-type classification using a lightweight rule-based strategy derived from the number and configuration of detected vehicles. The key insight is that temporal understanding benefits from supervised fine-tuning on synthetic data, whereas spatial understanding is better served by pretrained object detectors and physics priors that transfer naturally across domains.

Repository exploration is a distinct and costly stage of coding-agent pipelines: before generating a patch, an agent must identify which repository files are likely to matter. We study whether this stage can be delegated to lower-cost models while retaining useful localization quality. Using our IssueLoc-Bench, we evaluate five explorer models under the same read-only interactive interface on 499 SWE-bench Verified-derived tasks and 500 tasks from 153 additional repositories. We measure early candidate discovery, top-three gold-file coverage, strict file-set recovery, agent time, and token usage, with paired instance-level uncertainty and repository-clustered sensitivity analysis. The highest-quality explorer leads across localization metrics, but substantially cheaper operating points emerge: depending on the model and evaluation arm, lower-cost explorers retain approximately 78-94% of the reference Hit@3 and 73-92% of its F1 while reducing mean agent time by 41-88% and token usage by 84-95%. The preferred operating point depends on how localization is consumed downstream: ranking and coverage metrics characterize recoverable candidate handoffs, whereas F1 and exact match characterize restrictive file gates. These results support treating repository exploration as an independently measurable and budgetable stage of modular coding agents, with explorer selection guided by the downstream handoff contract.

Leak localization is usually evaluated as forced-choice prediction, although sparse hydraulic observations may not justify excavation. Here, we quantify a pressure-information limit and use it to recast localization as selective, evidence-gated decision-making. A physics-grounded executor falsifies competing leak, demand, sensor and valve hypotheses in a hydraulic twin. Deterministic code computes every number and every acceptance predicate; an independent large language model auditor may add a rejection but never overturn a failed check. Forced retrieval placed only 95 of 300 leaks in the correct zone. Across 550 mixed events, the gate acted on 223 (214 correct); on a third-party 33-leak benchmark, all four accepted events were correct. In a replay of 194 audited City D repairs, the pressure tier authorized five excavation recommendations, three matching the repaired district, while the district-inflow tier returned the correct district for 85 events. Observability limits with machine-checkable abstention enable auditable utility intervention.

Local chemical perception and property reasoning are both essential for understanding how molecular structure determines properties. Current LLM-based chemical reasoning methods either receive SMILES/molecular images together with descriptions of local motifs, or reason directly from molecular images. Neither approach enables the model to focus on chemically meaningful regions before reasoning. To address this gap, we propose Visual Latent Structural Reasoning (VLSR), an end-to-end framework that jointly learns localization and reasoning from molecular images. Central to our approach is a localize-then-reason strategy. VLSR first learns to locate chemically meaningful regions in a molecular image. It then reasons about their property effects in a compact latent workspace before producing the final answer. Under the same inference setup, this design achieves 9.6X higher throughput than a comparable textual-reasoning baseline.

Activation steering turns localized representations into control directions, but localization alone does not reveal whether a direction has a selective operating regime. We introduce Predictive Memory Localization (PML), which treats the measured-grid intervention path as the predictive object of memory localization. PML separates random-calibrated target movement from semantic-neighbor and capability damage, and compares static localization and supervised geometry with a strength-disjoint low-dose causal response. Our frozen study covers 3,000 records from nine datasets and fourteen domains, yielding 30,000 distinct record-direction-layer paths and 210,000 distinct path-strength evaluations. At layer 7, the geometry-derived RFM/AGOP direction reaches 13.1% target-any and 12.3% clean-any, exceeding random by 3.6 and 3.4 percentage points under a record-paired bootstrap. Across record-, dataset-, and domain-grouped splits, responses at $|α|=0.1$ are the strongest signal for outcomes at disjoint strengths $|α|\in\{0.25,0.5\}$. On held-out records, a predictor-driven selector chooses a coefficient or abstains, improves utility and reduces semantic-neighbor damage relative to a train-tuned fixed-strength policy, and avoids most evaluations in a dense scan. Across three residual-norm-matched base models, learned directions retain selective-path gains and low-dose responses yield 0.801-0.828 record-held-out macro AUROC. PML therefore turns memory localization into a falsifiable forecast of margin-level selective outcomes and a risk-aware intervention decision.

A growing body of work reports that language models represent task-relevant latent structure that they fail to use. Whether such structure, once located, can be converted into behavior is a separate question that is rarely tested end to end. We submit the complete pipeline -- detect, localize, and release -- to a fully preregistered stress test on a 25.7M transformer trained on causal-evidence discrimination, where a known suppression phenomenon (latent causal structure present but behaviorally unused) has previously been documented. Every threshold, claim template, and decision-tree branch was hashed and archived before any corresponding data existed. Three findings. (i) Localization succeeds: interventions at observation-evidence channels of mid layers restore target behavior on otherwise-suppressed worlds (paired release advantages $0.563$ and $0.854$, 97.5% CIs excluding zero; best-site release rate $0.889$). (ii) Gating fails out of distribution: a detector calibrated to trigger on zero out-of-distribution calibration worlds triggers on 6.9-7.3% of held-out in-distribution generations and on zero of the 2,400 held-out generations that actually need it -- a complete inversion that silently reduces the gated pipeline to its base model. (iii) Linear release is capped: removing the gate and injecting a per-instance linear direction unconditionally yields a monotone dose-response that plateaus far below the preregistered release margin (intercept $0.382 \to 0.311 \to 0.264$ vs. threshold $\le 0.08$); per-instance adaptivity adds less than $\pm 0.03$. The failure is doubly located: the detector is OOD-inverted, and the entire family of linear release directions at this site and resolution is bounded away from sufficiency. The two failures are dissociable, and neither overturns localization. Every number traces to a hashed artifact in the released audit chain.

Assessing catheter and tube placement on chest X-rays is safety-critical yet tedious and error-prone. Current deep learning methods either classify placement globally -- losing track of which device is where -- or segment all devices into a single mask, making per-device assessment impossible when catheters overlap. We introduce UCompCXR, a compositional framework that detects local catheter fragments, associates them into device instances via graph-based clustering, fuses per-fragment tip predictions through precision-weighted Gaussian estimation, and classifies placement per device. On the RANZCR CLiP dataset (30,083 images, 5-fold patient-level CV with bootstrap CIs), UCompCXR detects 26% more devices than a strong multi-task baseline sharing the same MobileNetV3 backbone, with 75% fewer false positives and well-calibrated tip uncertainty (95% coverage = 0.948). The aggregate tip error rises -- but only because the model finds devices the baseline misses entirely, especially nasogastric tubes. On matched devices, catastrophic localization failures drop substantially. At 2.27M parameters in a single forward pass, the model is deployable on resource-constrained clinical hardware.

In LLM pre-training, synchronization propagates rank-local stalls, slowdowns, and numerical errors into job-wide symptoms, obscuring their origin. Existing diagnosis often relies on in-process monitors that cannot report after the trainer blocks or terminates, or on post-mortem logs that preserve only synchronized symptoms; offline health tests lose the workload and operating conditions that triggered the failure. We present SCOUT, a unified runtime failure-localization framework built on one design principle: identify outliers through strict-majority consensus among equivalent replicas. SCOUT aligns replica progress, timing, and numerical evidence, then uses its Consensus Collective Communication (C3) abstraction to identify ranks whose compact signatures disagree with their peers. An out-of-band CPU observer remains responsive when training hangs, whereas in-situ replay exercises recurring stragglers and silent data corruption (SDC) beside the live job with its model state, kernels, allocations, communication path, and thermal and memory pressure present. Collective fingerprints expose rank-local protocol divergence. Clean replay coverage certifies checkpoint numerical integrity, preventing recovery from selecting state corrupted by SDC. SCOUT integrates with PyTorch, TorchTitan, Megatron-Core, and DeepSpeed without training-loop or framework-source modifications. SCOUT is open source at https://github.com/LMResiliency/lm-resiliency.

Text-to-Video (T2V) generative models are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks in real-world deployment, leading them to produce harmful or inappropriate content. Existing defense approaches mainly rely on input filtering or reconstruction, which not only incur high computational latency but also tend to distort semantics. To address these issues, we experimentally and systematically analyze the differences between clean and jailbreak samples in the cross-attention feature space, revealing for the first time a cumulative separation effect and a progressively increasing trend of linear separability between the two during the diffusion process. Based on this insight, we propose SafeCA, a feature-level defense mechanism for safe cross-attention localization and regularization. Firstly, we identify key defensive regions and values through attention stability analysis using cross-attention features collected from clean prompts within a single inference. Secondly, SafeCA mitigates anomalous activations via attention masking with energy normalization and introduces a lightweight semantic-space adapter to redirect abnormal semantic flows. Furthermore, we detect and suppress potentially malicious tokens by back-propagating feature anomaly signals to the input cue words, thereby enhancing the deployability of the defense in commercial models. Experimental results show that SafeCA reduces the jailbreak success rate by about 20% on mainstream T2V models, adds almost no inference overhead (+0.1s), and maintains good text-video semantic consistency. Overall, SafeCA provides an architecture-level, deployable protection paradigm for T2V generation models.

Multilingual translation benchmarks are typically sourced in English and translated into other languages, treating language pairs as the unit of evaluation---a design that is prone to contamination over time and overlooks locale and cultural considerations. We therefore advocate for source-contrastive evaluation and instantiate it with Cultivar, a localised subset of FLORES, which enables locale-specific translation evaluation. When paired with unlocalised counterparts, performance discrepancy allows the probing of data contamination and localisation robustness. We benchmark 32 open-weight models and find that MT-specialised models are less robust, a few models potentially overfit FLORES, and models tend to translate US content better than that of other locales, regardless of language.

Lane detection requires recovering thin, elongated, and frequently occluded lane structures under challenging driving conditions. While anchor-based detectors provide efficient candidate generation, their performance is limited by two coupled issues: backbone features often lose structural continuity along partially visible lanes, and classification confidence may decouple from line-level localization quality, allowing inaccurate anchors to persist before non-maximum suppression (NMS). We propose a structure-enhanced and quality-aware framework that improves lane representation and dynamic-anchor scoring while preserving the inference pipeline of the Anchor Decomposition Network (ADNet). Specifically, a Gated Horizontal-Vertical Token (GHVT) module enhances mid- and high-level backbone features via lightweight directional token interactions with a learnable residual gate. In parallel, Line-Quality-Aware Dynamic Anchor Scoring (LQAS) calibrates existing classification logits using quality supervision, hard-negative suppression, and pairwise ranking without adding inference branches. On the VIL-100 dataset, our method improves ADNet-R34 from 89.97 to 91.28 in F1 score at the 0.5 intersection-over-union threshold (F1@50), reducing both false positives and false negatives. Additional experiments on CULane and TuSimple datasets, extensive ablations, score-distribution diagnostics, and runtime analysis confirm complementary structural and ranking improvements with minimal computational overhead.

Recent developments in planetary exploration have shown the potential of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), such as the Ingenuity helicopter that provided valuable mapping data. However, limited payload capabilities constrain the flight times and compute available for localization, which restrict their applicability. By providing a tethered connection, issues such as battery and computational constraints are offloaded to the base rover. At the same time, the cable can be exploited for non-drifting localization. This work presents a novel Tether-Inertial Localization approach that uses tether length and angle measurements to estimate the UAV position relative to its base. The method combines a computationally efficient analytical catenary model with a Gaussian Process (GP) residual error compensation. This accounts for systematic sensor inaccuracies and model limitations. Experimental validation across circular, triangular, and figure-eight trajectories with tether lengths up to 4.5 m and a total flight time of 37 minutes demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Using only tether-based position estimates for feedback, the analytical catenary model achieves an average RMSE of 7.4 cm, which is further reduced to 5.2 cm through GP-based residual compensation, one order of magnitude better than the state-of-the-art. These results establish Tether-Inertial Localization as a practical alternative to vision- and GNSS-based localization for Tethered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (TUAVs).

This paper studies hidden-target localization from range-bearing packets reported by a relay beacon whose global position and yaw are unknown. The vehicle knows its own trajectory but never directly senses the target; the relay packet contains only local-frame range and bearing to the vehicle and to the hidden target. Unlike bearing-only network localization, relative-frame localization, and target-enclosing control, the target is neither directly observed in the vehicle frame nor treated as a node in a relative-sensing graph. The main result characterizes the minimal motion that removes the resulting calibration ambiguity: one vehicle pose leaves a continuous yaw/translation/target gauge, whereas two distinct vehicle-relative observations from one unknown-pose relay constructively determine relay yaw (modulo 2 pi), relay position, and the anchored target in the noiseless case. A local rank corollary, a shared-target multi-beacon extension, and a trajectory-spread conditioning lemma connect relay self-calibration to finite-window excitation and native range-bearing estimation. In Monte Carlo evaluation the estimator recovers the hidden target with 5.5 mm RMSE, five times below the 30 mm per-packet range noise and thirteen times more accurate than a naive EKF baseline; it converges to the same accuracy from 2 m target offsets and 2.4 rad yaw errors, and Huber weighting preserves millimeter accuracy under 10% outlier corruption that drops the unprotected estimator to a 0.10 success rate. Trajectory spread predicts estimator quality: the two weakly excited trajectories carry condition numbers above 100 with success rates of 0.82 and 0.70, while every well-excited trajectory attains full success.

Learning-based wireless localizers often fail to utilize geometric information about the propagation environment, limiting their ability to exploit non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation and generalize across scenes. To bridge this gap, we propose GLocFM, a Geometry-aware Localization Foundation Model, which jointly exploits WiFi measurements and scene geometry represented as a 3D point cloud. We formulate localization as a maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation problem, where the goal is to find a transmitter position that maximizes the likelihood of the wireless observations conditioned on the scene geometry. The likelihood of a candidate transmitter position is calculated by a learned scoring function that matches the observed delay--angle-of-arrival (AoA) spectrum against the spectrum predicted for that candidate. A hierarchical scene encoder extracts propagation-relevant features to produce geometric priors for LoS and one-bounce reflection paths. For scenarios with imperfect synchronization, we further introduce a time-of-flight (ToF)-robust GLocFM model to handle unknown ToF offsets. GLocFM is trained on a multi-modal synthetic indoor localization dataset comprising 221 diverse scenes whose associated wireless signals are generated using Sionna RT. On both synthetic and the NeRF$^{2}$ dataset based on real measurements, GLocFM reduces mean 3D localization error relative to one of the state-of-the-art localization baselines by 49.5% and 48.8%, respectively. Ablations across different number of receiver, bandwidths, and array sizes further demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework.

Accurate landmark localization in medical images is a fundamental step for quantitative clinical measurement and downstream analysis. Existing localization methods have advanced, among which multi-stage refinement is a superior solution. Although this strategy mitigates the anatomical ambiguity inherent in single-stage global predictions, its high computational cost limits practical applicability. In this work, we propose a parameter-economic model, PPOC-LL, which leverages Prototype learning-based Progressive Offset Correction for Landmark Localization. Our contribution is three-fold. First, to drive coarse-to-fine landmark optimization, we introduce a multi-scale dynamic perception strategy for patch-level feature pyramid modeling. Second, to effectively handle anatomically similar patterns, we design a similarity-driven prototype learning mechanism that captures informative local semantics for robust offset prediction. Last, to stabilize the model learning and improve the overall performance, we incorporate a novel error-aware reliability regularization via tolerance-based balancing. We collected a large validation cohort, including two public and one private datasets spanning X-ray and ultrasound modalities, covering cephalometric, symphysis-fetal head, and fetal heart landmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PPOC-LL achieves satisfactory performance with a favorable trade-off between accuracy and model complexity.

Accurate user equipment (UE) localization is critical for beam management in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) based sixth-generation (6G) networks, especially if the direct base-station-UE links are unavailable. This paper proposes a beam-domain fingerprint framework that maps the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) across a small set of predefined RIS reflection states to the UE azimuth angle and range, without requiring channel state information (CSI). Crucially, we extend the framework to a realistic interference-impaired scenario in which a nearby cross-link interferer (CLI) corrupts the clean SNR fingerprint, yielding a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) fingerprint; an interference-to-noise ratio (INR)-constrained calibration strategy keeps the interference level physically interpretable. Four machine-learning (ML) regressors are evaluated under both conditions. Simulation results at 28 GHz with a 20x20 RIS show that k-nearest neighbors (KNN) achieves the lowest angle MAE of 0.37 degrees and range MAE of 4 cm under clean conditions, rising to 1.4 degrees and 7.6 cm under interference. A key finding is that interference degrades angle estimation substantially more than range estimation across all models, a consequence of the asymmetric encoding of location information in the beam-domain fingerprint.

This paper presents an end-to-end, IIIF-based pipeline that turns the digitised Armenian press of France into an interactive map of the 20th-century Parisian Armenian commercial community. On each page, commercial advertisements are located, read, and parsed into structured records, which are then geocoded and placed on the map. Western Armenian is under-resourced and unsupported by off-the-shelf layout and OCR models, so the pipeline uses vision-language models (VLMs) as a data-bootstrapping strategy: they produce usable structured records at a scale hand annotation could not reach, and stay reliable on the strongly curved scans where conventional line-level CRNN OCR breaks down. The contribution includes a 500-page Western Armenian press corpus with 3,270 advertisement-level annotations, a Label Studio template that captures detection and semantic fields in a single annotation pass, and a reproducible workflow transposable to other under-resourced historical corpora. More broadly, the work shows that VLM-driven data bootstrapping is an effective lever for under-resourced historical languages such as (Western) Armenian.

Verifying the authenticity of satellite imagery has become increasingly critical given advances in generative artificial intelligence. Highly realistic synthetic imagery produced for malicious purposes (deepfakes) can have major consequences in the remote sensing domain, where this data is a fundamental source of information for science applications, planning, logistics, and monitoring. The remote sensing community lacks high-quality, fine-grained manipulation datasets suitable for training and evaluating detection and image forensics algorithms. Existing datasets are lacking and those that do exist either provide no ground truth masks for evaluating manipulation localization, or consist of entire images generated by GANs or diffusion models, which are inadequate for measuring localization performance. To address this gap, we describe a preliminary dataset construction process and prototype benchmark dataset for satellite image manipulation detection and localization. The dataset contains 60 images total, with 30 images carefully manipulated using three manipulation types including copy-paste splicing and diffusion model inpainting, and 30 authentic images. Each image is accompanied by a ground-truth mask and acquisition metadata, enabling both pixel-level localization metrics, image metadata studies, and analyses of how manipulation detection performance relates to image collection parameters. We describe the dataset construction process and present this initial release to support further research in image forensics and geospatial deepfake detection. The prototype dataset can be downloaded at https://huggingface.co/datasets/geodf/fmow-fake-small.

The work of Tang et. al. (2025) on numerical translation is extended by analysing the capability of five large language models (LLMs) for the localisation of times, numbers, and dates instead of translation. Models were selected that could be loaded onto and run on commodity hardware and a baseline quality for each mode is computed, then three different strategies to improve on that accuracy were tested. In contrast to Tang et. al., it was discovered that on the tested LLMs, embedding the localisation principles into the prompt context provided a statistically significant improvement in accuracy compared to direct translation or the alternative strategies.

We tackle the challenging yet underexplored task of Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC), which requires a model to localize the object described by a textual expression when it exists (positive sample) and to refuse output when it does not (negative sample). Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at localizing existing objects, they often fail to reject nonexistent ones due to the absence of negative samples during training, producing hallucinated bounding boxes. Existing post-training approaches such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) enhance refusal behavior but usually degrade localization accuracy on positive samples, undermining the model's core competence. To address this, we propose Refusal-Calibrated Group Relative Policy Optimization (RC-GRPO), a calibrated RL strategy that strengthens the refusal ability of MLLMs while preserving localization performance. It enforces "None" outputs in rollouts for valid advantage estimation on negative samples and applies a penalty to prevent over-refusal on positives, achieving a balanced trade-off between accuracy and reliability. A second-stage reasoning reinforcement further consolidates causal understanding and interpretability. Experiments on three GREC benchmarks demonstrate that RC-GRPO attains superior localization accuracy while maintaining strong refusal capability.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) make grounded predictions in real-world scenes by combining visual and textual cues, yet existing benchmarks rarely reveal how they arbitrate between these evidence sources when they conflict. We introduce SIGNPOST-Bench, a controlled counterfactual benchmark for evaluating text-vision conflict resolution. Each source image is transformed into a counterfactual quintuplet of Original, Blank, Similar, Random, and Adversarial variants. Synthetic, localized scene-text interventions are designed to preserve non-textual content, enabling paired measurements of changes in localization performance and directed shifts toward geographic targets introduced by conflicting text. SIGNPOST-Bench contains 5,111 counterfactual groups and 25,555 image variants from four datasets. We evaluate 20 MLLMs from seven providers. Compared with Original images, Adversarial variants raise median localization error from 282 km to 1,347 km, a 4.8-fold increase. Among geocodable adversarial samples, 6.5-20.1% of predictions lie less than 50 km from the injected target across models, and every evaluated model exhibits a positive mean paired reduction in target distance from Blank to Adversarial. Compatible, unrelated, and conflicting text replacements produce distinct effects on model predictions, while clean-input localization performance does not fully predict robustness to conflicting text. These results establish visual geolocation as a continuous diagnostic of scene-text arbitration and provide a controlled framework for evaluating how MLLMs resolve conflicting multimodal evidence.

When a language model follows an in-context conditional rule such as "if P(x) then A else B," does it assemble a runtime circuit with one module that tests the predicate and another that routes the answer? We probe this with activation patching under a four-donor design whose two swapped-rule donors make the condition and the answer word disagree, so each layer reveals which of the two it carries. Across three open models from two families and six languages sharing one fixed item bank, a mid-stack residual band carries the predicate's truth value: patching it reroutes the answer with predicate-outcome flip near 1.0 and mapping flip near 0.0, meeting a strict pre-specified isolation criterion in 17 of 18 cells, and the same localization holds across five predicate families. The router shows the opposite profile. A learned subspace flips A and B near-perfectly within the trained pair yet transfers to a new pair at approximately 0 in every model, while in Gemma-3-4B (the only model probed cross-lingually) it transfers at approximately 0.98 to the same pair in other languages. Under every probe we ran, the router direction is token-bound and non-transferable (largely answer-readout in Gemma, pair-specific in Qwen) rather than an abstract routing module. Test is modular; under these probes, route is not.

Large language models can generate fluent Arabic answers while introducing factual errors that are difficult to identify and verify. Existing Arabic hallucination resources often assign a binary label to an entire response, indicating whether it is hallucinated or non-hallucinated, but provide limited information about the exact erroneous content, the reason for the error, or the correct factual answer. We present HalluTruthQA-4K, an expanded version of the HalluTruthQA resource containing 4,000 expert-curated Arabic question-answering instances across four knowledge-intensive domains: Islamic knowledge, history, science, and geography. Serving as the official dataset for Track 2 of the HalluScoring 2026 shared task, HalluTruthQA-4K extends our original corpus to 4,000 instances. Each instance pairs an Arabic question with a model-generated response, a verified reference answer, and five plausible distractors. Hallucinated responses are additionally annotated with character-level erroneous spans, human-written explanations, and hierarchical hallucination types. The corpus contains 1,643 hallucinated and 2,357 non-hallucinated responses, with 1,843 annotated erroneous spans. We describe the resource construction and annotation methodology, including question selection, controlled answer generation, candidate construction, expert annotation, independent verification, adjudication, and quality control. We also document the annotation guidelines, taxonomy, data format, inter-annotator agreement, and corpus statistics. HalluTruthQA-4K provides a reusable resource for hallucination detection, span-level error localization, explanation generation, factual verification, and the broader evaluation of factual reliability in Arabic language models.

GUI grounding maps natural-language instructions to click locations and is essential for reliable GUI agents. The task remains difficult on high-resolution, densely populated interfaces because a vision-language model (VLM) may recognize a requested control without locating it precisely enough for interaction. Most existing methods provide various forms of localization assistance, but still rely on a direct click prediction, allowing visual ambiguity or an inaccurate initial estimate to propagate to the final result. In this paper, we introduce GUI-Lens, a coarse-to-fine grounding framework that allows a general-purpose VLM to determine the target through active visual observations. Specifically, GUI-Lens extracts OCR text and detected UI components from the screenshot and presents their positions as coordinate references. Using the instruction, the current view, and these references, the VLM selects the region and scale of the next view, which is cropped and enlarged to provide finer visual details. This process continues over successively focused views until the target is determined. Proposed crops and clicks are checked against the instruction throughout the process, and the final local position is mapped back to the original screen coordinates. Experiments on four GUI grounding benchmarks and three general-purpose VLM backends show that GUI-Lens improves overall grounding accuracy by up to 24.9 percentage points and achieves state-of-the-art performance with GPT-5.5.

Software fault localization identifies the code locations responsible for reported issues and is a fundamental step toward automated debugging and program repair. Recent retrieval-based approaches formulate fault localization as a dense retrieval task by learning a shared embedding space between issue reports and source code. However, these methods encode all issue reports using a fixed query representation, despite the substantial diversity of real-world issue reports in length, structure, and debugging information. To address this limitation, we propose HyperFL, a query-adaptive representation learning framework for software fault localization. HyperFL employs a lightweight hypernetwork to generate query-specific LoRA parameters for the query encoder, enabling dynamic query adaptation while keeping the code encoder fixed and reusable. Experiments on a real-world issue localization benchmark demonstrate that HyperFL consistently improves retrieval performance across multiple embedding backbones, achieving up to 13.3% relative improvement in function-level MRR@10 and 16.7% relative improvement in Hit@1 over the state-of-the-art method SweRank. Further analysis shows that HyperFL learns distinct adaptation patterns for different issue characteristics, highlighting the effectiveness of query-adaptive representations for software issue localization.

Accurate localization remains a key challenge in swarm robotics, particularly for self-reconfigurable systems that must identify relative positions to form diverse structures. Most existing approaches rely on external tracking infrastructure or high-cost sensors, which limit scalability and deployment in unstructured environments. In this paper, we propose a novel contact-driven localization method for modular robots that leverages only local communication through binary contact information (whether two robots are physically connected or not). To exploit these contact cues, we introduce a virtual-force framework in which robots iteratively refine their poses attracting toward dock-connected neighbors and repelling from non-connected ones. The method requires no external infrastructure and relies only on minimal onboard sensing. Simulations show effective localization during the assembly of towers and cantilevers, enabling accurate, scalable, free-form self-assembly.

Ask a commercial image editor to preview a cosmetic procedure and it will often change more of the face than the request names: a nose edit can also smooth skin or alter lighting. Existing methods for confining an edit to one region require access to the model's internals, which a public editing API does not expose. We ask how much control is possible from the client side alone. In a pilot benchmark, six commercial editing configurations and one mask-based inpainting model perform facelift-style jaw-neck and rhinoplasty edits at three levels of client-side control: the prompt alone; cutting the edited region out of the response and pasting it back onto the original photograph through a landmark-derived mask (a masked composite); and asking the model itself to inpaint inside the mask where supported. Of 210 attempted edits, 196 could be scored. ArcFace cosine measures identity preservation; a CIELAB pixel-change ratio measures how much change lands inside the requested region rather than a protected facial zone. On the 12 frontal faces the regional metric could score, the masked composite improved localization over the paired prompt-only output by a median of 0.446 (95% face-clustered bootstrap interval 0.421-0.457) while changing the requested region about as much. Editors differed in edit strength versus identity retention, and the one inpainting model we tested did not beat the simple composite. Against each face's input-to-postoperative baseline, no editor moved its outputs closer to the postoperative photograph in identity-embedding terms. This is a study of control, not clinical accuracy: no surgeons rated the outputs, and each condition was generated once. Within that scope, keeping a surgical preview inside its intended region needs no access to the model; a mask and composite on the client enforce it across every editor tested, at low provider cost.

This paper is concerned with one-bit mean estimation, where each independent sample is represented by a single binary message. We consider distributions on $\mathbb{R}$ with mean in $[-λ,λ]$ and absolute $k$-th central moment at most $σ^k$, where $k>1$ is fixed. For this class, previous work attained the optimal sample complexity for general queries using a two-stage protocol. The first stage localizes the mean. The second-stage queries are chosen after localization and refine the estimate around the decoded center. We show that this interaction can be avoided by constructing a randomized fully non-adaptive protocol that fixes all queries before observing the data and matches the optimal adaptive sample complexity. For target accuracy $ε$ and confidence $1-δ$, its sample complexity scales as $$\log\fracλσ + \begin{cases} (σ/ε)^2\log(1/δ), & k>2,\\ (σ/ε)^2\log(σ/ε)\log(1/δ), & k=2,\\ (σ/ε)^{k/(k-1)}\log(1/δ), & 1<k<2, \end{cases}$$ up to constants depending only on $k$. In the range covered by the known lower bound, this rate is minimax optimal even among fully adaptive protocols. This gives a negative answer to the COLT 2026 open problem asking whether interaction is necessary for order-optimal one-bit mean estimation with general queries \citep[Open Problem~1]{lau2026open}.

Vulnerability localization is a fundamental step in software security, requiring models to reason over large codebases and iteratively identify vulnerable implementations. We present Antares, a family of compact language models (350M, 1B, and 3B parameters) for agentic vulnerability localization. Based on IBM Granite base models, Antares is trained through a two-stage pipeline that combines supervised fine-tuning on cybersecurity reasoning and repository exploration data with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards over vulnerable repositories. Across extensive evaluations, Antares-3B approaches GPT-5.5 while outperforming open-weight models over 200x larger in size. The Antares family further enables fast, low-cost local inference, completing a full 500-task evaluation sweep in approximately 15 minutes on a single H100 GPU, corresponding to an amortized evaluation time of under 2 seconds and less than $0.002 per task.

Submarine fiber-optic cables instrumented with distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) provide an effective approach for large-scale monitoring of fin whales. We present an end-to-end workflow for detecting, characterizing, and localizing fin whale notes, tested on two submarine telecom cables in the Strait of Gibraltar and western Alboran Sea. The workflow applies a kurtosis-value picker adapted to narrow-band fin whale notes. Channel-wise detections are grouped into individual notes using density-based spatio-temporal clustering, cluster agglomeration, and hyperbolic fitting to reject incoherent picks. The retained clusters are characterized through temporal, spectral, and energy-related descriptors that support note-type discrimination and estimation of inter-note intervals. Relative arrival times across DAS channels are then used in a grid-search procedure to estimate candidate source locations. Evaluation against manually annotated detections from six fin whale songs yielded median pick-level precision of 0.990 and recall of 0.744, and median cluster-level precision of 0.880 and recall of 0.806. Representative applications demonstrate separation of overlapping vocalizations, characterization of type-A and type-B notes, and the inference of apparent source movement. By transforming dense DAS recordings into compact note-level bioacoustic information, the workflow provides an integrated framework for fin whale monitoring and a basis for adaptation to other synchronized acoustic receiver arrays.

Accurate indoor localization is essential for emerging applications in robotic navigation and search and rescue. While classical methods typically focus on single-point estimates, complex indoor environments with heavy blockage and multipath propagation often lead to multimodal likelihood surfaces where a single estimate is insufficient. This paper proposes LOCUS-DT (Localization via Observation-Conditioned Uncertainty Scoring with Digital Twins), a framework that treats snapshot localization as posterior inference over the transmitter location. By leveraging a ray-tracing-based digital twin (DT) of the known environment, LOCUS-DT generates synthetic multipath profiles for candidate locations and compares them against the measured channel profile. Central to our approach is a novel learned scoring function designed to compare a fixed number of dominant specular paths, providing robustness against errors in both the DT environment model and the physical channel estimation. Importantly, LOCUS-DT is trained over an ensemble of environments to ensure generalization to unseen layouts. We evaluate the system using a Sionna-based ray-tracing backend, demonstrating that LOCUS-DT captures the sharp, multimodal posterior structures inherent in indoor settings more accurately than standard Gaussian or Gaussian-mixture benchmarks.

This paper proposes a localization framework that uses spatiotemporal fields governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) as localization signatures. Two PDE classes are considered: the shallow water equations, which describe free-surface flows in coastal and riverine environments, and the advection-diffusion equation, which models the transport and mixing of scalar quantities such as temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. A numerical PDE solver provides predicted fields over the domain, and multiple field channels are fused as multimodal measurements to improve localization accuracy. We formulate the problem within a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter (RBPF) that partitions the vehicle state into a nonlinear component sampled by particles and a linear sensor bias component tracked analytically via per-particle Kalman filters. This factorization reduces the required number of particles compared to a standard particle filter while accounting for realistic sensor drift. Simulation studies on both PDE scenarios show that the RBPF consistently outperforms a standard particle filter in terms of final position error and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) across varying particle counts. Field experiments with an autonomous surface vehicle measuring salinity, temperature, and dissolved oxygen validate that PDE-governed environmental fields provide sufficient spatial variability for practical localization. Related experimental videos are available at https://localization-environmental-pdes.github.io/.

Accurate estimation of left ventricular (LV) orientation is essential for cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging and downstream analysis. Existing methods typically formulate orientation recognition as discrete view classification or rely on multi-slice geometric intersection, limiting their ability to model continuous 3D orientation and generalize across arbitrary slices. This work introduces a novel paradigm: Joint LV localization and 3D orientation estimation from a single CMR slice. To investigate this setting, representative orientation-aware detection frameworks are adapted to the CMR domain, and their limitations are analyzed. Upon that, we propose the Polar-Coupled Circular (PCC) embedding that provides a continuous and unambiguous orientation representation to address the limitations. Meanwhile, a scalable benchmark is constructed through automatic slice sampling from volumetric CMR segmentation datasets. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate strong performance, achieving an average mIoU of 86.18% and an average angle deviation of 3.39°. This study establishes a new task setting for single-slice LV orientation modeling and provides a geometry-consistent framework for spatially informed CMR analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/yuyi1005/cmr-3d-ood.

AI-generated image forgeries are becoming increasingly realistic and difficult to characterize with fixed manipulation patterns. As generative models continue to evolve, it is impractical to expect a localization model to exhaustively learn all possible forgery appearances from large-scale training data alone. Nevertheless, many AI-generated forgeries still leave subtle forensic traces, although these cues are often weak and unevenly reliable across regions. Therefore, robust localization requires not only extracting informative forensic traces, but also making reliable decisions from incomplete and ambiguous evidence. In this paper, we move beyond static one-shot prediction and reformulate final forgery localization as an adaptive sequential decision-updating process, where the localization map is treated as an intermediate state rather than a fixed output. Rather than producing the final mask via one-shot pixel-wise prediction, our method progressively updates the localization state guided by available evidence, uncertainty, and boundary conditions. Specifically, we first transform mesoscopic traces into compact decision evidence via a lightweight decision evidence projector, and then introduce Evidence-Guided Mamba (EG-Mamba) to perform uncertainty- and boundary-aware state updating. This design allows reliable manipulated and background regions to be preserved, while ambiguous regions are cautiously revised according to the available evidence. Extensive experiments on both conventional and AI-generated manipulation benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Notably, even when trained only on conventional manipulation data, our method brings larger gains on unseen AI-generated forgeries, indicating that progressive decision-updating is especially useful for heterogeneous and hard-to-exhaustively-learn manipulation traces.

Recent incidents of accidental damage and suspected sabotage to submarine telecommunication and power cables, particularly in the Baltic Sea, have underscored their vulnerability and the need for continuous monitoring solutions. Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) applied to submarine optical-fiber cables enables wide-area monitoring of underwater acoustic activity. We present the Marlinks-NS DAS dataset, comprising processed submarine DAS measurements and AIS-derived vessel information curated for cable-protection research. The dataset defines two machine-learning tasks (vessel detection and vessel-to-cable distance estimation) allowing reproducible research under realistic marine conditions. The dataset contains 74,771 labeled data instances from ten days of continuous recording along a 2,554 m segment in a 28 km buried fiber-optic cable in the North Sea. Each instance includes spectral-energy features from 250 sensing channels, together with anonymized distance measurements and metadata from AIS information. The released HDF5 data, documentation, processing description, and example code support reproducible development and evaluation of DAS-based vessel-monitoring methods for submarine cable protection.

Existing audio forgery detection and localization (AFDL) methods often overfit dataset-specific low-level artifacts, limiting their generalization to subtle, localized, and unseen manipulations. Recent audio large language model (ALLM)-based approaches cast AFDL as question answering but still model forensic evidence implicitly, without linking manipulation cues to predictions. To bridge this gap, we propose ThinkOmni, a reasoning-driven omni-modal large language model that jointly performs explicit forensic reasoning, spoofing detection, and temporal manipulation localization. To enable explicit reasoning supervision, we construct Forensic-Aware Chain-of-Thought (FACoT), a 100K-sample dataset with structured forensic evidence and reasoning annotations. Leveraging FACoT, we introduce Forensic-Aware Modality-Incremental Learning (FMIL), which progressively aligns semantic, acoustic, and spectral-visual representations with the LLM backbone to capture complementary forensic cues. We further propose Forensic-Consistent Multi-task Loss (FCML), which combines weighted cross-entropy with an adaptive localization loss to coordinate reasoning generation, spoofing detection, and temporal localization. Extensive experiments show that ThinkOmni achieves strong cross-dataset generalization in both detection and localization. Code, models, data, and inference examples are available at https://beyond0814.github.io/ThinkOmni/.

Detecting when the statistical behavior of an engineered system changes, and identifying which component is responsible, are core problems in the monitoring of telecommunication networks, robotic platforms, security infrastructure, and multi-agent systems. In safety- and mission-critical deployments, such decisions must be accompanied by statistical reliability guarantees rather than by point estimates alone. Conformal changepoint localization (CONCH) and conformal root cause analysis (CROC) meet this need by returning confidence sets that contain the true changepoint, or the true root-cause stream, with a user-specified probability, without parametric assumptions on the data-generating process. In practice, however, observations are frequently corrupted, e.g., by outliers, sensor faults, or adversarial perturbations. While the finite-sample coverage of these procedures is preserved under contamination, the resulting confidence sets can become uninformatively large. Adopting a Huber-type contamination model, this paper proposes weighted CONCH (W-CONCH) and weighted CROC (W-CROC), which downweight observations that are likely to be corrupted with the goal of reducing confidence set size when data may be corrupted. The weighting mechanism, derived from a formal bound on the unknown corrupted data densities, leverages pre-existing second-order classifier-based uncertainty signals, such as those produced by evidential deep learning or Bayesian learning. W-CONCH and W-CROC are further generalized by introducing a meta-learning procedure for the weights that optimizes a differentiable surrogate of the confidence set size. Experiments on image-based and real-world changepoint and root-cause benchmarks show that uncertainty-based weighting substantially reduces confidence set size while maintaining the target coverage.

Background manipulation is a practical but under-specified image-forensics setting: the manipulated evidence can sit outside the salient foreground object, while many evaluations emphasize object-centric copy-move, splicing, or generic synthetic edits. We introduce BG-REAL, a public real-data anchored benchmark package for background manipulation detection and localization. The current release is built from Open Images V7 instance-segmentation sources and contains 7,000 processed samples over 1,200 source groups, including 6,000 public-data anchored samples and 1,000 synthetic control samples. BG-REAL covers six edit families, matched authentic controls, source-group splits, mask and leakage QA, 599 human-assisted quality-control rows, three completed external baselines (TruFor, MVSS-Net, and HiFi-Net), and five-seed model evaluation. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we use matched-authentic-control diagnostics to measure how often baselines misclassify re-encoded authentic images as manipulated at a threshold fixed on held-out validation data; false-positive rates range from 0.57 (TruFor, the lowest) to 1.00 (several weak or mask-informed baselines), indicating that re-encoding artifacts are a shared shortcut risk across baselines rather than a problem specific to any one model. The release provides the construction pipeline, evaluation protocol, paper-ready figures, and reproduction documentation. We frame BG-REAL as a background-manipulation-focused complement to general image-manipulation-localization benchmarks, not as a fully real-only or general-purpose benchmark.

Embodied AI increasingly relies on queryable semantic maps built from pre-trained vision-language models to enable zero-shot Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav). However, existing approaches typically depend on text-only queries, which become less reliable as semantic specificity increases toward fine-grained object categories. We introduce IMPRINT, a zero-shot plug-and-play framework that enriches textual object queries with web-sourced images to improve grounding in queryable maps. Retrieved images are encoded using a vision-language model, matched against the semantic map to produce similarity maps, and aggregated to yield context-aware localization. Notably, this requires no training or modification of the underlying navigation policy. To explicitly evaluate long-tail behavior, we present HSSD-rare, a new ObjectNav benchmark built on Habitat Synthetic Scenes and featuring semantically specific subcategories. Across both OVON and HSSD-rare, image-conditioned queries consistently improve object grounding and yield end-to-end navigation gains. Further analysis reveals that translating localization gains to navigation performance depends critically on downstream detection quality, highlighting a key systems bottleneck in long-tail embodied navigation.

Foundation-model-based vision-language navigation (VLN) has advanced autonomous robot navigation by enabling robots to interpret natural-language instructions, identify semantic goals, and follow user-specified behavioral rules. However, existing VLN systems rely heavily on cloud-hosted foundation models for language understanding and semantic grounding, limiting their applicability where network connectivity is unavailable and reliable metric goal localization is required. Although recent small language models (SLMs) enable fully onboard inference, their suitability for navigation instruction decomposition has not been systematically evaluated. This paper makes three contributions toward fully onboard VLN for outdoor environments. First, we present the first systematic benchmark of 17 edge-deployable SLMs against 4 online APIs for robotic navigation instruction decomposition, evaluating accuracy and latency on human-annotated instructions across three computing platforms and providing practical guidance for selecting onboard language models. Second, we propose a lightweight hybrid semantic-geometric goal localization framework that combines open-vocabulary object detection, prompted segmentation, and LiDAR geometry to estimate metric goals, while maintaining visual bearing guidance when reliable geometric observations are unavailable. Third, we integrate these advances into Edge-BehAV, a fully onboard extension of the BehAV architecture that enables cloud-independent behavior-guided navigation. Experimental results show that the best offline SLM matches the instruction decomposition performance of the strongest cloud API while running approximately 9x faster and without network connectivity. The proposed goal localization framework reduces mean goal-distance error from 2.05 m to 0.20 m at lower computational cost, and the complete system succeeds in 31 of 32 closed-loop outdoor trials.

Bowel obstruction is a common and potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal condition. In the face of rising diagnostic workloads, the automated diagnosis of bowel obstruction on CT scans supports radiologists by accelerating detection and improving patient outcomes. In this work, we propose a deep learning framework with a multi-task objective that jointly detects bowel obstruction and localizes its transition zone. Additionally, we extend the method with an inherently interpretable classification method that locates the suspected transition point within a slice. It does so by learning a probabilistic selection mask that faithfully bases the classifier's prediction solely on a small image region. The proposed method is evaluated on an internal dataset comprising 1,427 abdominal CTs. Here, the model achieves an obstruction detection test accuracy of 93% and a Hit@10 transition zone localization of 95%. As the first method to reliably localize the transition zone, this marks a significant step towards the automated identification of this critical clinical landmark.

Geomagnetic sensing offers an infrastructure-free, absolute orientation reference that is robust to GNSS denial and visual degradation, yet no large-scale outdoor robotics dataset supports its systematic study in SLAM. Existing magnetic datasets are confined to small-scale indoor environments and lack the synchronized multi-modal sensing, repeated-traversal structure, and high-precision 6-DoF ground truth required for geomagnetic SLAM research. We present Mag4D-SLAM, the first large-scale outdoor geomagnetic SLAM dataset. It comprises 14 sequences totaling over 18 km of synchronized LiDAR, camera, IMU, tri-axis magnetometer, and GNSS measurements with SE(3) ground-truth poses, collected along structured campus trajectories under paired day/night conditions in both forward and reverse directions. Through repeated-traversal experiments, we analyze three core properties: magnetic field repeatability across different recording sessions (daytime and nighttime), drift-free global heading estimation, and location-discriminative magnetic signatures for cross-session place recognition. Mag4D-SLAM is designed to support research on yaw drift mitigation, magnetic loop closure, and long-term localization and to open new research questions on how geomagnetic sensing can complement visual and LiDAR modalities or provide a fallback cue under illumination changes, structural repetition, and GNSS-denied long-term operation.

Scaling inference-time computation has emerged as a reliable method to improve the performance of large language models on complex reasoning and programming tasks. However, standard approaches such as independent sampling and sequential multi-turn refinement operate without token-level credit assignment, resulting in computational inefficiency, since valid reasoning prefixes are frequently discarded. In this work, we introduce Test-Time Scaling via Error Localization (TTEL), an inference-time algorithm that utilizes fixed or environment feedback to perform token-level error localization. By comparing conditional probabilities under informed feedback against a null-context baseline, TTEL isolates the step at which an error occurred. The algorithm then truncates the trajectory and branches a new generation, maximally reusing the valid prefix. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that TTEL establishes strictly dominating Pareto frontiers across sequential reasoning domains, measured by pass-at-k vs. generated-token cost. With Qwen3-8B on LiveCodeBench, TTEL attains a pass@64 of 71.0% while generating approximately half as many tokens as independent sampling (360.4k vs. 735.0k). Generalizing to math benchmarks AIME-2025 and HMMT-2025, TTEL cleanly outperforms competing test-time baselines across both Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507.

Continuously recorded high-resolution waveform measurements provide rich information about fast power system dynamics. However, they require automated methods to identify events. This problem is addressed by developing a spectrogram-based framework to jointly detect, localize, and classify events in real-world continuously recorded waveforms at the terminal of an Inverter-Based Resource. We recast this problem as a temporal object detection problem on spectrogram images, as they capture the transient and harmonic signatures more explicitly than in raw waveform data. Each time-series waveform is transformed using the short-time Fourier transform, and the resulting per-channel spectrograms are stacked as a tensor for event detection. We benchmark this method against a detector operating directly on raw time-series measurements. Experiments on single-phase disturbances and three-phase faults demonstrate that the proposed spectrogram method consistently improves event detection, localization, and classification over the raw waveform baseline.

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent Arabic answers, yet factual errors remain difficult to detect, localize, explain, and verify. Existing hallucination benchmarks often provide response-level labels, with limited support for identifying the exact erroneous content, explaining why it is incorrect, or selecting the correct factual answer. We introduce HalluTruthQA, a fine-grained benchmark for hallucination evaluation in Arabic question answering. The benchmark contains 2,400 expert-curated examples across four knowledge-intensive domains: Islamic knowledge, history, science, and geography. Each example pairs an Arabic question and a model-generated answer with a verified reference answer, a binary hallucination label, and six candidate answers for factual verification. Hallucinated answers additionally include character-level erroneous spans, human-written explanations, and macro- and micro-level hallucination types. We evaluate four open-source LLMs, ALLaM-7B, Falcon-H1R-7B, Qwen3-32B, and SILMA, in a zero-shot setting across hallucination detection, span-level localization, factual verification, and explanation evaluation. Results show that these tasks capture different abilities: no single model performs best across all tasks. The best scores are 0.880 Macro-F1 for detection, 0.516 F1-Sp for localization, 0.852 LO-Score for factual verification, and 0.644 for explanation evaluation. These findings show that hallucination evaluation should move beyond response-level detection toward the localization, verification, and explanation of factual errors.

Global visual localization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using remote-sensing reference maps has attracted increasing attention. However, acquisition-time and imaging-platform differences between UAV and reference imagery induce substantial cross-domain appearance and viewpoint shifts, challenging robust six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation. We address these shifts by sampling UAV-viewpoint reference views from Google 3D Tiles across locations, altitudes, and orientations. A two-stage cross-domain fine-tuning recipe adapts SALAD using pose-near positives and geographically distant hard negatives, while local geometric consistency re-ranks the Top-K candidates. We further propose Retrieval-In-Matching (RIM), which freezes the adapted DINOv2-B retriever and distils a local-descriptor decoder that reuses its token field alongside a shallow VGG19 detail stream. One query-side DINOv2-B forward thus serves both SALAD retrieval and local description, eliminating a second foundation-model backbone while preserving retrieval descriptors by construction. We evaluate RIM zero-shot on the reconstructed EPFL Urbanscape and self-collected Chang'an Park datasets, both geographically disjoint from the training data. RIM outperforms ten recent retrieval baseline families. At 25/50 m under the full 3D distance metric, it improves Recall@1 over SALAD by 8.55/13.77 percentage points on EPFL and 4.45/8.94 points on Park. At Top-K=5, the complete measured localization query, including retrieval, candidate matching, and robust geometric verification, takes 67.9 ms end-to-end: 1.8 times faster than the strongest separate sparse-matching baseline and over 40 times faster than RoMa, while achieving comparable re-ranking accuracy. These results establish an efficient and deployable pipeline for UAV global visual localization in GNSS-challenged environments.

Existing image manipulation localization (IML) methods rely heavily on 2D forensic cues, such as low-level artifacts, noise traces, and semantic inconsistencies in the manipulated image. While effective in many cases, these cues become much less discriminative when manipulated regions are well blended with their surrounding context in appearance. In such cases, a manipulated region may remain locally appearance-consistent, but still violate the geometric structure of the surrounding scene. This limitation motivates us to go beyond purely 2D evidence and introduce geometric reasoning into IML. To this end, we leverage monocular reconstruction to obtain auxiliary geometric cues, including depth and surface normals. However, a key challenge lies in the fact that reconstructed geometry on manipulated images is inherently noisy and cannot be used naively. Rather than treating depth and normals as direct evidence, we estimate their reliability and exploit them selectively for localization. Based on this principle, we design a geometry-aware framework (GFrame) that fuses reliable geometric cues with RGB features and propagates them across scales to improve fine-grained localization. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves excellent performance under limited budget constraints. These results indicate that reliable 3D geometry provides complementary forensic evidence beyond traditional 2D cues for IML. Related code will be released.

We study whether \sigreg -- LeJEPA's anti-collapse objective -- can reshape representations during standard autoregressive language-model pretraining, and when the resulting geometry helps \kv-cache quantization. We train 110M-parameter models on 10B FineWeb tokens and report three findings. \textbf{(1)} At $λ{=}0.01$, \sigreg reduces hidden-state pairwise-cosine anisotropy by $38\%$ across three paired seeds. Perplexity increases by less than $0.35\%$ in every pair, with no consistent zero-shot loss. \textbf{(2)} This change does not propagate from hidden states to the \kv cache. Applying \sigreg directly to K and V during continued training, however, reduces mean cache anisotropy by $94\%$ across four checkpoints. A matched continuation without the \kv term leaves cache geometry nearly unchanged, and the frozen-trunk retrofits we tested do not reproduce the effect. \textbf{(3)} Under untransformed symmetric group-free quantization, direct \kv regularization is the only training condition that prefers per-channel scaling in all three seeds, and under that same 3-bit per-channel scheme the baseline incurs $4.3$--$7.9\times$ the directly regularized model's \dnll. Under the full simulated KIVI-style configuration (mixed arrangement, zero-points, grouped scales), however, all models reach near-parity, including when storage overhead is approximately matched. In this 110M regime, the training intervention helps when quantizer scales are coarse; the advantage vanishes under the tested combination of token-local grouping, mixed \kv scaling, and zero-points. To our knowledge this is the first training-time \emph{distributional} regularization of standard \kv-cache geometry evaluated against post-hoc cache quantization.

Accurate and robust wireless localization is a critical enabler for emerging 5G/6G applications, including autonomous driving, extended reality, and smart manufacturing. Despite its importance, achieving precise localization across diverse environments remains challenging due to the complex nature of wireless signals and their sensitivity to environmental changes. Existing data-driven approaches often suffer from limited generalization capability, requiring extensive labeled data and struggling to adapt to new scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose SigMap, a multimodal foundation model that introduces two key innovations: (1) A cycle-adaptive masking strategy that dynamically adjusts masking patterns based on channel periodicity characteristics to learn robust wireless representations; (2) A novel "map-as-prompt" framework that integrates 3D geographic information through lightweight soft prompts for effective cross-scenario adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple localization tasks while exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization in unseen environments, significantly outperforming both supervised and self-supervised baselines by considerable margins.

Real repository issues routinely include visual evidence such as screenshots, error dialogs, rendered UI states, and logs, yet repository-level issue localization is evaluated mostly as a text-only task. Existing multimodal SE benchmarks evaluate end-to-end repair, entangling localization with patch synthesis and obscuring whether visual input helped, hurt, or was ignored. We introduce \textbf{MM-IssueLoc}, a controlled benchmark and evaluation protocol for repository-level localization with visual evidence. MM-IssueLoc contains 652 issue-PR instances across 23 languages, with annotations for 7 image categories and 4 relevance levels. It provides file-level and function-level gold labels, paired text-only and with-image evaluation, and VCE-based diagnostics that convert images into structured textual evidence. We evaluate LLM-based and retrieval-based systems, including MM-IssueLoc-VL-Emb as a controlled multimodal retriever. Results show that existing systems remain far from reliable multimodal repository localization: the strongest agent reaches 38.96 file Acc@5 and 22.45 function Acc@10, while the strongest retriever reaches 33.86 function Acc@10. Cross-benchmark comparisons show that high localization scores on text-dominant SWE benchmarks do not transfer cleanly to multimodal issue localization. MM-IssueLoc turns visual evidence into an explicit evaluation variable, enabling future work to test whether systems improve by using visual evidence for localization, rather than by relying on text-only cues or downstream patch-generation effects.

This paper introduces Actor as Its Own Critic, a unified reinforcement learning framework, Cycle Group Relative Policy Optimization (CycleGRPO), that jointly optimizes region understanding and localization for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Unlike existing separate pipelines, we leverage the inherent duality between the two tasks to construct a self-evaluating reinforcement learning paradigm: "region $\to$ text $\to$ region''. Specifically, a single MLLM first acts as the actor to generate region captions, then immediately transitions to a critic to ground its generated text back in the spatial domain. Therefore, CycleGRPO requires only region inputs, e.g., masks or bounding boxes, entirely bypassing the need for textual ground truths. A quality-aware token-level cycle-consistency reward is employed to assess the semantic discriminability of text captions via their physical localization accuracy. Empirically, built upon SAMTok, our CycleGRPO framework successfully bootstraps both capabilities simultaneously. Without any task-specific fine-tuning, the framework yields consistent performance gains across a wide range of benchmarks, including region captioning, region VQA, grounded dialogue, and referring segmentation. Overall, CycleGRPO offers a straightforward and scalable way to advance pixel-level capabilities in MLLMs. Code and models are released at https://github.com/devinxzhang/CycleGRPO.

Chest radiography (CXR) remains the most widely used thoracic imaging modality, yet expert interpretation is constrained by a severe shortage of radiologists in Thailand and across Southeast Asia. Local adaptation of deep learning models to Thai data has been shown to substantially improve accuracy on Thai populations. Here we present the development and comprehensive validation of the chest radiograph analysis model in Inspectra CXR version 5, a deep learning system that performs multi-label thoracic disease classification and weakly supervised lesion localization within a single model. The architecture couples a DenseNet-121 backbone with Attend-and-Compare Modules (ACM) and a Probabilistic Class Activation Map (PCAM) aggregation layer, producing a per-condition classification score and heatmap simultaneously. The model was developed on 874,858 frontal chest radiographs with paired radiologist reports from Siriraj Hospital, Bangkok. On a held-out, radiologist-verified in-domain test set of 19,871 cases, it achieved a mean AUROC of 0.994 (mean sensitivity 92.4%, specificity 98.6%) across nine clinically important conditions. On an independent generalization set of 5,992 cases from 13 hospitals across Thailand, the mean AUROC was 0.970, indicating robust transfer across sites. For localization, evaluated on 4,549 radiologist-annotated cases, the model attained a mean lesion-localization fraction (LLF) of 77.9% at 0.59 non-lesion localizations per image. In a usability evaluation with five thoracic radiologists, the system reached a classification concordance of 93.6%, a localization concordance of 94.7%, and a mean System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 89. These results indicate that a locally developed, localization-capable CXR system can deliver high accuracy, generalize across heterogeneous Thai hospitals, and earn the trust of practicing radiologists.

While global localization using spinning radar has gained attention for its robustness to adverse weather and challenging environments, many studies have focused on individual components such as place recognition or pose estimation. In this paper, we take a holistic view of radar sensor-based global localization and present RadLoc, a fast, robust, and lightweight end-to-end pipeline from place recognition to 3-DoF pose estimation. RadLoc accelerates pre-processing using 1D CA-CFAR filtering and leverages the near-range dominance in spinning radar images to design a compact descriptor and an efficient hierarchical coarse-to-fine retrieval strategy. Moreover, coupled with phase correlation-based 3-DoF pose estimation, it forms a versatile global localization module applicable to SLAM and multi-session SLAM systems. Extensive experiments on 15 sequences across 5 datasets demonstrate that RadLoc achieves robust performance while maintaining the smallest descriptor size and fastest retrieval time among state-of-the-art approaches. The supplementary materials are available at https://sparolab.github.io/research/radloc/.

Angular radio maps describe the received-power distribution over the angle of arrival and underpin beam selection and receiver localization in sixth-generation (6G) networks. Predicting the angular power spectrum (APS) from geometry is difficult, because the mapping is ill-posed in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions and must generalize to unseen environments. Distortion-minimizing regressors return the conditional mean, which over-smooths the spectrum and erases the multipath structure that downstream tasks need. We cast the task as a perception-distortion problem and propose RadioDiff-v2, a dual-branch one-dimensional diffusion transformer trained with flow matching. It couples periodic angular encoding, adaptive layer-normalization conditioning, a Fourier angular mixer, and joint velocity and clean-signal heads. A per-metric estimator portfolio reads every deployment quantity from this single model, so that samples carry the distribution, the clean-signal head supplies a regression-grade point estimate, Bayes-optimal rules select beams, and the conditional likelihood localizes the receiver. We prove that a concentrated conditional yields a straight probability-flow trajectory that one step integrates exactly, identifying deterministic transport as the correct inductive bias. On a zero-shot test of 99 environments and one million links, RadioDiff-v2 leads every baseline on every metric, with a 0.39 dB Wasserstein-1 distance, per-bin error below the regression baseline, a 2.43 dB eight-beam NLOS sweep loss, and a 20.6-pixel localization error with four base stations. Code is available at https://github.com/UNIC-Lab/RadioDiff-v2.

Multi-robot localization that is accurate and consistent is imperative for downstream tasks such as planning and control. Centralized filtering approaches optimally fuse all available sensor measurements of the team. However, a centralized solution is rarely implementable due to hardware, communication, and computational constraints. Distributed approaches deploy a filter on each robot to estimate their own state and neighbours' states using inter-robot communication. This paper proposes a consistent, communication-efficient, and consensus-based distributed filtering framework that shares both preintegrated odometry and relevant shared states among communicating robots. The proposed method is validated in simulated and experimental scenarios, showing near centralized performance in accuracy, and especially in consistency, compared to the current state-of-the-art decentralized approach.