Receptive Fields

Event cameras provide low-latency, high temporal resolution perception for real-time vision tasks such as robotics.The novel circuitry (i.e. asynchronous, independent pixels) that enables these advantages also introduces new algorithmic challenges. Velocity-invariant representations alleviate missing observations under slow motion and motion blur under fast motion, but most discard temporal information by converting events into image-like representations. We propose Set of Centre Active Receptive Fields (SCARF), a real-time velocity-invariant representation that preserves raw events while consistently handling fast motion, stationary scenes, and independently moving objects. SCARF achieves state-of-the-art performance in both computational efficiency and representation quality.

Identifying isolated points is important in image processing applications such as medical imaging, astronomy and quality control management. Other domains, such as cybersecurity, also present challenges that can be framed as image processing problems. One example of particular interest is the identification of anomalous single nodes in spatially organised networks where groups of nodes in different regions share similar feature values. This task can involve both binary and more complex grayscale images. However, existing methods face limitations: template matching is infeasible for grayscale images, while 2nd order derivative based methods are highly sensitive to noise and require user-specified thresholds. To overcome these issues, a novel method is proposed for detecting meaningful single-pixel deviations in images. This approach modifies and extends a neuron model, originally designed for anomaly detection, to operate on spatially diameter limited receptive fields that incorporate excitatory and inhibitory regions. The result is a method that is free from user-specified thresholds and parameters, and can be applied to both binary and grayscale images, providing an effective, robust and efficient solution.

Evolvable-Substrate HyperNEAT (ES-HyperNEAT), a bio-inspired indirect encoding that determines neuron placement and connection weights from spatial coordinates, exhibits a failure mode on MNIST as a diagnostic benchmark. Because input pixels map to a coordinate space centered at the origin, evolved networks converge on a small central cluster of input pixels, a spatial-concentration bias; prior work observed only 21% mean accuracy in this regime. Is this bias an optimization artifact or an architectural ceiling? Inspired by Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) principles, we partition the input into non-overlapping spatial segments, each assigned to a separately evolved specialist network. With 13 such experts, this design reaches 43% mean accuracy, a 106% relative improvement over the baseline. The architectural gain does not depend on data-driven aggregation: equal-weighted averaging, which uses no validation data, already yields a 70% improvement; the gain comes from partitioning, not the weighting. Receptive-field analysis shows the mechanism: partitioning forces evolution to discover features across the entire image, expanding active pixel coverage from 4% to 79%. Absolute accuracy stays below gradient-trained baselines, but the relative gain points to central bias, not the evolutionary search. Two tools are designed to generalize beyond MNIST: a receptive-field diagnostic for silent input-coverage collapse, and a spatial-partitioning remedy that restores coverage.

Hyperspectral image classification still relies heavily on random pixel splits within a single scene. The Salinas dataset, randomly split, is among the most widely used datasets for comparing different architectures. However, under a random split method, a large fraction of test pixels fall immediately adjacent to a training pixel, which inflates reported accuracy. This work introduces a leakage-free evaluation protocol linking spatial separation to the model's receptive field. Applying this protocol across ten different architectures, including classical, spectral, spectral-spatial, transformer, vision-backbone, and state-space families, shows that Macro-F1 drops by 0.147 on average and model rankings change by as many as five places. Furthermore, leakage-free evaluation limits which architectures can be tested on a given benchmark. Since each partition supports patches only within a finite radius, reporting this radius alongside the receptive field is essential for fair comparison. In addition, this study reveals that all ten architectures misclassify largely the same pixels, pointing to a spectral ambiguity in the data that none of them resolves.

Wavelet convolution (WTConv) has emerged as an increasingly popular drop-in replacement for standard convolutions, expanding a network's receptive field exponentially with the number of decomposition levels while keeping the parameter count linear. However, its reference implementation is severely memory-bound due to excessive data movement through high-bandwidth memory (HBM). We develop an I/O model of WTConv to characterize this bottleneck and use it to guide three algebraic reformulations: (1) recomputing the inexpensive Haar analysis butterfly on chip, (2) collapsing the multi-level synthesis cascade into a single closed-form pass indexed by output-coordinate bits, and (3) folding learned per-channel scales into the convolution weights. Together, these reformulations enable an I/O-aware fused implementation that substantially reduces HBM traffic. We evaluate the WTConvNeXt configuration across decomposition levels and a broad range of tensor shapes. Despite performing comparable arithmetic, the reference WTConv is substantially slower than the depthwise convolution it replaces. Our reformulation reduces modeled HBM traffic by approximately $2.55\times$, yielding up to a $4.35\times$ training speedup over the reference while roughly halving peak memory usage. Thus, our reformulation preserves the benefits of WTConv while substantially reducing its execution time and memory footprint, removing the systems overhead that previously limited its practical efficiency.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) generate multivariate physiological time series that are highly nonstationary and must often be processed under strict computational and memory constraints. A critical yet underexplored challenge in this setting is selecting an appropriate temporal receptive field, which serves as a strong inductive bias for anomaly detection models. Existing approaches typically rely on fixed temporal contexts, which can perform inconsistently across heterogeneous signal regimes and require dataset-specific tuning. We propose ORCA, an agentically controlled anomaly detection framework that dynamically adapts the temporal receptive field at inference time based on lightweight signal statistics. Rather than introducing additional trainable parameters or learned policies, ORCA employs a supervisory controller that autonomously selects among discrete temporal contexts, enabling state-dependent inductive bias adaptation without retraining. Across a custom WBAN dataset, ORCA achieves performance comparable to the strongest fixed-context baselines (AUROC = 0.99) while eliminating the need to tune temporal horizons in advance. We further evaluate ORCA on MIMIC-IV as a challenging out-of-distribution benchmark, observing conservative generalization behavior without performance collapse under heterogeneous clinical conditions. These results highlight adaptive temporal inductive bias control as a practical and robust design principle for anomaly detection in resource-constrained, nonstationary physiological time series.

Screen content images are generally composed of texts and graphics. Compared to natural images, these man-made images contain a large quantity of sharp but repetitive structures. However, existing works in screen content super-resolution underutilize the special characteristics of screen content, leaving a large room to improve model performance and speed up. In this paper, we propose PixelSR, a simple yet effective method to improve super-resolution performance but with faster inference speed. To improve model performance, we classify pixels via pixel binning to compute content attention in the training phase. Specifically, after binning pixels into content-dependent groups, content attention is aggregated from pixel features within each group to introduce a content-dependent and non-local receptive field for every pixel. In the testing phase, we utilize the properties of self-repetitiveness and redundancy in screen content to speed up inference without the loss of model performance. We divide targeted high-resolution pixels into three types, which are unique pixels, repeated pixels, and background pixels for each test image. We conduct conventional network processing on unique pixels and cache their predictions in the on-the-fly lookup table. For repeated pixels which have appeared in unique pixels, we directly retrieve prediction results from the lookup table without network processing. For background pixels, we use the nearest neighbor algorithm to generate high-resolution pixels. The on-the-fly lookup table is cleaned and repeats the procedure above for the next test image. Experiments show our PixelSR achieves state-of-the-art performance with shorter inference time in screen content super-resolution.

In this work, we investigate a previously unexplored architectural dimension for infrared small target detection: the organization of effective receptive fields (ERFs) during feature refinement. Unlike existing approaches that primarily improve individual feature operators, we argue that ERF organization constitutes an architectural dimension independent of receptive field design itself, and formulate deep feature transformation as a progressive residual correction process, from which a theoretical framework for ERF scheduling is established. Specifically, we reveal that ERF refinement is governed by two fundamental properties: scale-frequency correspondence, which aligns different ERF scales with distinct residual frequency characteristics, and nonlinear non-commutativity, which makes different ERF orderings produce fundamentally different refinement trajectories. Together, these properties show that ERF organization, rather than ERF scale alone, governs refinement dynamics. Guided by these principles, we propose Receptive Field Ordering Network (RFONet), which realizes hierarchical ERF scheduling through a multigrid-inspired V-cycle strategy using only standard $3\times3$ convolutions. RFONet achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks with only 1.16M parameters and over 157 FPS inference speed. Beyond empirical performance, our theoretical analysis provides theoretical guarantees for stable residual refinement under perturbations, frequency shifts, and partial occlusions, which are consistently reflected in superior noise robustness and cross-dataset generalization. Finally, our framework reformulates ERF organization as a task-dependent optimization objective, providing a principled foundation for future adaptive receptive field scheduling.

Vascular segmentation is a standard procedure for clinical diagnosis, yet the specific visual features determining model decisions remain poorly understood. This paper investigates the visual cues Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) use to segment blood vessels across two distinct imaging domains: fluorescence microscopy and retinal fundus photography. We employ a series of experiments to quantify the influence of shape, texture, and receptive field on segmentation performance. First, we isolate texture and intensity by evaluating performance on patches subjected to pixel shuffling and normalization. Second, we assess global shape relevance by training models on sparse contours and centerlines. Lastly, we quantify the required spatial context by systematically varying the network's theoretical and effective receptive fields. Within the scope of the evaluated datasets, we found that pixel intensity is more relevant than texture, though networks maintain surprisingly high accuracy even when both cues are removed. Furthermore, CNNs struggle to extrapolate full vessel geometry from shape cues alone, typically relying on a relatively small effective receptive field of around 20 pixels, though global context provides a modest benefit for fundus images. While specific to the modalities studied, this methodology offers a quantitative foundation to audit and refine deep learning systems in vascular imaging.

Binary change detection in remote sensing requires both complete changed-region localization and accurate boundary delineation. We present MambaRefine-CD, a region-boundary temporal refinement framework built on a shared MambaVision encoder. The proposed D-RBI module constructs temporal evidence from paired features, absolute differences, and signed differences, then separates it into region and Sobel-conditioned boundary streams. Region features are enhanced with CRAM-lite and decoded by an adaptive receptive-field FPN, while the finest boundary stream guides a bounded residual refinement of the coarse prediction. Experiments on DSIFN-CD and WHU-CD show strong changed-class F1 and IoU under verified evaluation settings, and ablations support the contribution of signed temporal evidence and the full region-boundary refinement pipeline.

Vision-based 3D occupancy prediction fundamentally relies on the 2D-to-3D view transformation. Current paradigms predominantly utilize explicit physical projection, which artificially restricts the routing matrix to strict, sparse camera rays. While computationally efficient, this imposes a severe Locality Bottleneck, preventing the network from constructing holistic contextual understanding and degrading sharply when camera extrinsics are unreliable or absent. To break this bottleneck, we abstract view transformation as unconstrained bipartite routing and propose Factorized Dense Routing (FDR). By approximating dense 2D-to-3D mixing through hierarchical tensor contractions, FDR guarantees a fully-global receptive field with tractable, sub-quadratic complexity. Crucially, the mandatory spatial contraction in dense routing exposes a fundamental Resolution-Context Trade-off. To address this, we introduce a Resolution-Context Decoupled Architecture. We factorize the 3D space into a global macroscopic topological anchor (via FDR) and precise local geometric planes (via explicit projection). This decoupling enables global semantic inference and exact surface localization to complement each other without mutual compromise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Occ3D-nuScenes and Occ3D-Waymo benchmarks. More notably, in an uncalibrated setting where physical extrinsics are withheld, our global routing internalizes the implicit multi-camera rig topology and exhibits substantially stronger structural robustness than physical-projection baselines under the same protocol.

Driven by Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC), the authenticity of audio-visual content is facing severe challenges. Temporal Forgery Localization (TFL) aims to precisely identify manipulated segments within untrimmed sequences. However, existing methods are limited by CNNs' local receptive fields or Transformers' quadratic complexity, while emerging linear models often struggle to balance global authentic context compression with local abrupt forgery perception. To address this, we propose MG-RWKV, a multi-granularity framework that leverages the data-dependent state evolution of RWKV to achieve efficient full-sequence processing with O(T) complexity. Our framework features three core innovations: (1) a Bidirectional RWKV architecture that captures bidirectional temporal contexts without quadratic overhead; (2) a Multi-Granularity Mixture of Experts (MG-MoE) that performs dynamic routing over explicit temporal receptive fields, adaptively selecting granularities based on forgery duration to significantly enhance decision interpretability; and (3) Cross-Granularity Consistency (CGC), which aligns adjacent feature pyramid levels through hierarchical scale-wise pairing and spatial boundary-aware weighting, effectively reducing false positives in authentic regions. Extensive experiments on Lav-DF, TVIL, and Psynd datasets demonstrate that MG-RWKV achieves state-of-the-art performance with low computational cost.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have garnered significant interest in computer vision due to their potential for efficiency and biological inspiration. While spiking CNN-based methods have shown promise for image restoration (IR) tasks, their performance is constrained by the inherent receptive field limitations of CNN operations. In the paper, we explore the benefits of discrete wavelet transformation and propose a spiking pyramid wavelet-based model (SPWM) for high-efficient and low-energy target. Specifically, we develop a spiking dual pyramid wavelet (SDPW) block to model long-range dependency and exploit the properties of the degradation in the wavelet domain. Experimental results on several benchmarks demonstrate that SPWM significantly lowers computational costs and energy consumption while maintaining image quality. Our method showcases the potential of SNNs in the field of IR, offering new insights for future applications of resource-limited devices.

Deep neural networks have achieved strong performance in medical image classification, but often work like black-box. Commonly used post-hoc interpretation methods often provide heuristic visualizations whose relationship to the classifier's predictive distribution is indirect. This work introduces a local sensitivity analysis framework based on the input-dependent Fisher Information Matrix (iFIM) of a trained classifier. The iFIM characterizes how the classifier's predictive distribution changes under infinitesimal perturbations of the input image. By using a Gram-matrix formulation, the nonzero eigenspectrum of the iFIM can be recovered without explicitly forming the full image-dimensional Fisher matrix. The leading iFIM eigenspace is then used to project an input image into a high local-sensitivity component and its orthogonal component. These components provide a model-intrinsic description of local predictive sensitivity, rather than a conventional pixel-wise attribution heatmap or a causal segmentation of task-relevant anatomy. The framework is evaluated on controlled and clinical medical image classification tasks using multiple classifier architectures. Perturbation-based experiments show that high-sensitivity iFIM components are more strongly coupled to changes in predictive confidence and classification performance than lower-sensitivity complementary components. The results support the iFIM framework as a principled tool for analyzing local decision sensitivity and for complementing existing attribution-based interpretability methods in medical imaging.

Tactile imaging seeks to reconstruct the internal structure of soft objects through touch sensing, with applications in medical diagnosis and robotic manipulation. Recent self-supervised learning approaches have shown promising results, but rely on global, unstructured representations and robot-controlled sensing, limiting generalization and practical use. We propose Local Encoder for Spatial Sensing (LESS), an object-centric tactile representation that exploits the local nature of touch. The tactile scene is modeled as a grid of recurrent encoders with local receptive fields, whose states are fused to reconstruct 2D or 3D images of internal structure. This compositional design enables strong generalization: models trained on single-inclusion phantoms accurately image objects with multiple inclusions and varying sizes. The local structure further supports spatial uncertainty estimation. In addition, we enable hand-held tactile imaging via external pose tracking and human-like palpation data, and extend tactile imaging to full 3D reconstruction.

In image and surface-based learning tasks, convolutional features are typically extracted using receptive fields that are sampled uniformly across the entire domain. However, informative structures are rarely distributed uniformly in practice and are often concentrated in localized regions. Such phenomena are particularly common in medical imaging, where pathological changes are spatially confined. Consequently, uniform convolution allocates equal computational effort to both informative and uninformative regions, resulting in inefficient feature extraction and suboptimal utilization of model capacity. To address this issue, we propose a framework for task-adaptive sampling that dynamically redistributes computational attention according to the spatial importance of the data. Specifically, we introduce the Density-Equalizing Convolutional Neural Network (DECNN), which employs density-equalizing mappings to guide convolution through a learned density function. The density function encodes the relative importance of different regions and induces a transformation that enlarges informative areas while compressing less relevant ones. As a result, convolutional receptive fields are redistributed non-uniformly over the domain, enabling denser sampling in task-relevant regions. By coupling this importance-driven transformation with convolution, DECNN performs adaptive feature extraction that focuses computational resources on informative structures. This leads to more efficient use of model capacity, yielding a lightweight yet expressive architecture while simultaneously producing an interpretable saliency map. Experiments on image classification and craniofacial surface analysis demonstrate that DECNN achieves competitive or superior performance with fewer parameters, accurately identifies task-relevant regions, and remains robust under complex geometric variations.

CNN-based semantic segmentation networks usually rely on context heads such as ASPP, PPM, or attention modules to enlarge the receptive field. These heads are effective but may introduce heavy computation, memory cost, or boundary leakage. This paper revisits Directional Geometric Mamba (G-Mamba) from DGM-Net and studies it as a plug-and-play context aggregation module rather than a complete new segmentation architecture. The key idea is to inject geometric guidance into the selective scan process, allowing long-range feature propagation to be modulated by boundary and centripetal-flow cues. We replace the original context heads of six representative CNN segmentation models, including DeepLabV3+, DANet, CCNet, PSPNet, PSANet, and OCRNet, while keeping the ResNet-101 backbone unchanged. Results on Cityscapes show consistent mIoU gains with only moderate extra GFLOPs at $1024\times1024$ resolution, suggesting that geometry-guided SSM modules can serve as practical alternatives or enhancements to conventional CNN context heads.

Sparse coding provides a principled framework for signal representation by expressing an input as a linear combination of only a small number of basis functions. The Locally Competitive Algorithm (LCA) is particularly attractive in the context of neuromorphic computing because its dynamics, leaky integration, thresholding, and lateral inhibition map naturally to neuromorphic hardware. While prior work has studied non-convolutional LCA on Loihi 2, the convolutional setting is of particular interest because it introduces spatial structure, weight sharing, overlapping receptive fields, and scaling behavior that are more representative of practical sparse inference workloads. In this work, we present a Loihi 2 implementation of convolutional sparse coding via the LCA and evaluate it against a conventional GPU baseline on the same inference problems. The implementation follows a one-layer recurrent LCA formulation and extends it to convolutional feature maps with local inhibitory kernels derived from pairwise filter interactions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation and benchmark of convolutional LCA on Loihi 2. Our goal is not only to demonstrate feasibility, but also to clarify in which operating regimes convolutional sparse inference becomes attractive on neuromorphic hardware. The resulting study positions convolutional LCA as a useful benchmark for structured sparse inference on emerging neuromorphic systems.

The deployment of modern machine learning (ML) solutions on resource-constrained edge devices highlights implementation challenges. This is especially true for extreme edge applications that include safety-critical components, such as autonomous navigation tasks. This paper demonstrates an artificial neural network (ANN) design leveraging Metal-Oxide Resistive RAM (RRAM) -based Analogue Content Addressable Memory (ACAM) as an efficient hardware substrate for performing metric-based classification and online adaptation on the edge. The proposed design is based on a custom Template piXeL (TXL) cell used for building the ACAM module, where each TXL cell acts as a configurable receptive field neuron. These cells employ a Radial Basis activation function to calculate the distance of an input from the programmed receptive field. The TXL can be organised into dense arrays for calculating the distance of a high-dimensional input against all stored prototypes, effectively performing fast and energy efficient similarity search. This hardware engine enables on-the-fly learning, where the receptive field parameters can be tuned to track domain shift. Through simulation of the proposed TXL-RBF classifier we can achieve 89.1% accuracy on the MNIST dataset while consuming 185fJ per cell per operation when operating at 100MHz.

Deep learning surrogates for 3D Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) often fail to generalize across geometric transformations because they depend heavily on specific coordinate systems. While equivariant networks offer a solution, they typically rely on local operations in the spatial domain, making the global receptive field, which is essential for PDE dynamics, computationally expensive. Conversely, Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) efficiently capture global interactions, yet establishing 3D equivariance within them remains impractical due to the prohibitive cost of spectral group convolutions. To bridge this gap, we introduce EqGINO, a geometrically robust framework that enforces isotropy in the spectral domain. By design, EqGINO guarantees exact equivariance to the discrete symmetries inherent to the discretized computational domain. Beyond this discrete guarantee, our structural prior enables effective generalization to arbitrary continuous orientations even with a limited number of SE(3)-transformed training samples. Consequently, our method robustly models coordinate-invariant physical laws on complex irregular 3D geometries. Our code is available at https://github.com/sung-won-kim/EqGINO

This paper presents a magnet-based robotic skin that integrates a multilayer soft lattice with distributed Hall-effect sensor arrays and a tactile super-resolution model. External contact forces are converted to magnetic field changes by embedded permanent magnets, and the lattice spreads these changes across the sensing domain. This gives each sensor a large, overlapping receptive field and enables a large sensing area with minimal blind spots. Lattice parameters are tunable, enabling joint adjustment of mechanical compliance and transduction characteristics. An implicit modeling workflow and selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printing support rapid fabrication of conformal, high-complexity structures. A convolutional neural network trained on experimental measurements estimates contact location and normal force in real time. Experiments validate localization accuracy and indicate scalability to larger surfaces, suggesting applicability to whole-body robotic skin and safe human-robot interaction.

Recent advances in semantic segmentation rely heavily on attention-based and transformer-style architectures that, while accurate, introduce considerable architectural complexity and computational cost. This paper asks whether a compact CNN-based segmentation head can remain competitive by adaptively selecting useful receptive-field evidence. We propose ATV-Net, an Adaptive Triple-View Network that attaches a lightweight head to a conventional backbone. The head organizes three complementary views -- point-wise, neighborhood-level, and enlarged context -- and fuses them through an Adaptive Decision Gate that generates image-dependent weights from global feature statistics. This allows the model to emphasize different receptive-field responses according to scene content, without dense attention or multi-scale aggregation. Experiments on Cityscapes and Pascal VOC 2012 show that ATV-Net achieves 80.31% mIoU on Cityscapes with ResNet-101 and 80.90% with ConvNeXt-Tiny, and 86.7% and 88.5% mIoU on Pascal VOC 2012, respectively, while requiring fewer GFLOPs than representative context-aggregation and attention-based heads. The results indicate that adaptive receptive-field selection remains a practical and effective design choice for CNN-based semantic segmentation.

Low-light images suffer from severe noise, contrast loss, and semantic ambiguity, making enhancement a joint problem of denoising and detail recovery. We propose PixIE, a feed-forward pixel-space LLIE framework semantically prompted by a vision foundation model. PixIE first performs cross-scale denoising to suppress noise and preserve structure, then refines details using DINO-Prompted Pixel Blocks (DPPBs), which inject intermediate DINOv3 features through patch-conditioned, spatially continuous per-pixel modulation. To make pixel-space attention efficient across scales, we introduce Spatial-Channel Compaction (SCC), which jointly reduces the spatial token grid and channel dimension. We further propose Multi-Receptive-Field Pixel Embedding (MRPE) to provide neighborhood-aware pixel representations before semantic prompting, improving robustness to signal-dependent noise beyond point-wise embeddings. Experiments on LLIE benchmarks show that PixIE improves average PSNR by 1.9-15.0% over recent state-of-the-art methods and reduces LPIPS by 8.5-44.4%. Qualitative comparisons further show sharper details and more stable textures, improving both reconstruction fidelity and perceptual quality.

End-to-end scene text spotting, which unifies text detection and recognition within a single framework, has witnessed remarkable progress driven by deep learning advances. However, most existing approaches still suffer from incomplete mask proposals caused by multi-scale variation, arbitrary text shapes, and complex background interference, thereby degrading recognition accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel Soft Attention Mask Embedding module (SAME) that leverages the global receptive field of Transformer encoders to encode high-level features and compute soft attention weights, which are then hierarchically embedded with predicted masks to generate refined text-boundary-aware masks that effectively suppress background noise. Building upon this module, we present SAME-Net, a robust end-to-end text spotting framework that requires neither character-level annotations nor auxiliary text rectification modules. Since the soft attention mechanism is fully differentiable, recognition loss gradients can be back-propagated through the SAME module to the detection branch, enabling joint optimization of detection and recognition objectives. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: SAME-Net achieves 84.02% end-to-end H-mean on the arbitrarily-shaped Total-Text dataset, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art GLASS by 1.02% in full-lexicon accuracy without additional training data, and obtains competitive 83.4% strong-lexicon results on the multi-oriented ICDAR 2015 dataset.

Modern image encoders achieve high generalization by decoupling semantic meaning from resolution, an ability yet to be fully realized in the 3D domain. We investigate the failure of 3D point cloud encoders to achieve similar generalization and find that existing models are highly sensitive to sampling resolution and scale changes, leading to significant performance degradation. This sensitivity is a major bottleneck for real-world deployment in robotics, as it suggests models overfit to specific quantization densities and object scales rather than learning invariant semantic features. To mitigate this dependency, we propose Invaria, a point cloud encoder that achieves scale and density invariance through next-resolution prediction and receptive field calibration. While our objective is not the explicit generation of high-resolution point clouds, we find that this training objective encourages the model to learn robust, structural invariants. The resulting encoder achieves significant performance gains during resolution shifts while maintaining high efficiency through a compact model size and reduced token requirements. Specifically, on ScanNet, Invaria achieves a 56.0% higher mIoU at 3$\times$ lower resolution and a 20% improvement when the objects scale is reduced by a factor of 3. These gains are achieved with a 45% smaller model size and an average reduction of 40% in input tokens.

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have been extensively adopted for real-world image Super-Resolution because of their powerful generative priors through textual guidance. However, when super-resolving high-resolution images with patch-wise inference strategy, most existing diffusion-based SR methods tend to suffer from over-generation, due to the misalignment between the global prompt from LR image and the incomplete semantic information of local patches during each inference step. On the other hand, most existing methods also failed to generate detailed texture in local patches due to the overemphasis on global generation capabilities in network designs and training strategies. To address this issue, we present DreamSR, a novel SR model that suppresses local over-generation and improves fine-detail synthesis, thereby achieving visually faithful results with ultra-high-quality details. Specifically, we propose a dual-branch MM-ControlNet, where the ControlNet generates local textual feature with patch-level prompts while the pre-trained DiT provides global textual feature with global prompts, thereby mitigating over-generation and ensuring semantic consistency across patches. We also design a comprehensive training strategy with stage-specific data processing pipelines and a Receptive-Field Enhancement strategy, enhancing the model's capability to capture patch information and effectively restore local textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamSR outperforms state-of-the-art methods, providing high-quality SR results. Code and model are available at https://github.com/jerrydong0219/DreamSR.

A fundamental challenge in point cloud object detection lies in the conflict between the extreme sparsity of distant points and the need for remote context understanding. The existing methods typically use 1D serialization to expand the receptive field, which inevitably discards already scarce local geometric details and reduces detection of distant and small objects. To address this issue, we propose 3DTMDet, a novel detection network that synergistically combines state space models (Mamba) with Transformers. The core idea is to utilize SSM's linear complexity and advantages in long sequence modeling to effectively capture global interactions between sparse and distant points, while using Transformer modules with local attention to encode fine-grained geometric structures in local point sets, preserving accurate shape information. We propose the 3D Hybrid Mamba Transformer (3DHMT) block, which uses an SSM-Attention-SSM pipeline to balance global context understanding and local detail preservation, effectively alleviating the tension between receptive field enlargement and geometric preservation in remote detection. In addition, we introduced a voxel generation block inspired by LiDAR physics, which diffuses features along the sensor observation direction to reconstruct the complete object structure of occlusion and distant areas. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI and ONCE datasets have shown that 3DTMDet outperforms state-of-the-art detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/QiuBingwen/3DTMDet.

Biological neural circuits contain specialized substructures that support distinct computational functions, yet many bio-inspired neural networks borrow biological motifs without identifying their circuit-level origins. In this study, we investigate whether zebrafish tectal microcircuits can be attributed along two computational axes: energy-efficient information processing and robustness-preserving stabilization. We reconstruct a directed zebrafish-inspired retinotectal microcircuit graph and verify retinotectal signal propagation through dynamic simulation. A leaky integrate-and-fire spiking neural network is then used as a nonlinear perturbation testbed, where predefined subcircuits are selectively ablated and evaluated using the Energy Sensitivity Index and the Robustness Sensitivity Index.The results reveal a functional dissociation between two tectal subcircuits.The \textit{ns_TIN} subcircuit shows a low spike footprint but a measurable influence on prediction error, suggesting a role as a spike-efficient internal information gate.In contrast, the \textit{superficial_TIN} subcircuit produces the highest robustness sensitivity, suggesting a feedback-like role in maintaining system-level stability.We further transfer these attributed functions into ResNet18-based artificial neural networks and evaluate them on CIFAR-10 under inference-budget reduction and Gaussian noise corruption. The \textit{ns_TIN}-inspired module improves performance preservation under reduced computation, whereas the \textit{superficial_TIN}-inspired module improves robustness under input noise. These findings provide a subcircuit-level route for linking biological circuit organization with bio-inspired neural architecture design.

We present GraphDepth, a monocular depth estimation architecture that synergistically integrates Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) within a convolutional encoder-decoder framework. Our approach embeds efficient GraphSAGE layers at multiple scales of a ResNet-101 U-Net backbone, enabling explicit modeling of long-range spatial relationships that lie beyond the receptive field of local convolutions. Key technical contributions include: (1) batch-parallelized graph construction with configurable k-NN and grid-based adjacency for scalable training; (2) multi-scale GraphSAGE integration at bottleneck and decoder stages (1/32, 1/16, 1/8 resolution) to propagate global context throughout the feature hierarchy; (3) channel-attention gated skip connections that adaptively weight encoder features before fusion; and (4) heteroscedastic uncertainty estimation via a dedicated aleatoric uncertainty head, enabling confidence-aware loss weighting during optimization. Unlike transformer-based hybrids, which suffer from quadratic complexity in sequence length, GraphDepth scales linearly with spatial resolution while achieving comparable global receptive fields through iterative message passing. Experiments on NYU Depth V2, WHU Aerial, ETH3D, and Mid-Air benchmarks demonstrate competitive accuracy within 4.6% of state-of-the-art transformers on indoor scenes with substantially lower computational cost (25 FPS vs 9 FPS, 3.8 GB vs 8.8 GB VRAM). GraphDepth achieves the best reported result on WHU Aerial (RMSE 8.24 m) and exhibits superior zero-shot cross-domain transfer to the Mid-Air synthetic aerial dataset, validating the generalization power of explicit relational reasoning for depth estimation.

Graph foundation models (GFMs), pretrained on massive graph data, have transformed graph machine learning by supporting general-purpose reasoning across diverse graph tasks and domains. Existing GFMs pretrained with fixed-hop subgraph sampling impose a fixed receptive field, causing scale mismatch on diverse tasks, which often require heterogeneous and unknown structural contexts beyond a fixed sampling scale. We propose R-GFM, a Riemannian Graph-of-Graphs (GoG) based foundation model, that treats structural scale as a first-class citizen in modeling. R-GFM constructs a multi-scale GoG over-sampled subgraphs at different hop distances and learns geometry-adaptive representations from Riemannian manifolds. Theoretical analysis shows that R-GFM reduces structural domain generalization error compared to fixed-scale GFMs. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that R-GFM achieves state-of-the-art performance, with up to a 49% relative improvement on downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/USTC-DataDarknessLab/R-GFM.

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

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a practically important yet underexplored application of spiking neural networks (SNNs), where the dominant degradations are large-scale and low-frequency, such as wavelength-dependent colour casts and scattering-induced veiling. Existing SNN restoration designs rely on locally bounded spiking perception, which can limit global correction and lead to saturated or inconsistent representations. To address these challenges, we propose a scale-aware SNN framework for UIE named UIESNN. At its core is a Multi-scale Pooling LIF Block (MPLB) that injects hierarchical multi-scale pooling responses into membrane dynamics, thereby enlarging the effective receptive field while preserving fine-grained details and inducing heterogeneous scale-dependent activations. Building on MPLB, we design a spiking residual architecture that integrates frequency decomposition and attention-based refinement in a fully spike-driven pipeline. Extensive experiments on the EUVP and LSUI benchmarks demonstrate that UIESNN achieves state-of-the-art performance among SNN-based methods, delivering improved colour fidelity and spatial coherence with competitive energy cost.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods introduce a small number of training parameters, enabling pre-trained models to adapt rapidly to new data distributions. While these methods have shown promising results, they exhibit notable limitations. First, most existing methods operate in the signal space domain, which results in substantial information redundancy. Second, most existing methods utilize fixed prompts or adaptation layers, failing to fully account for the multi-scale characteristics of signals. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-Scale Frequency Adapter (FreqAdapter), which integrates textual information and performs multi-scale fine-tuning of signals in the frequency domain. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale adaptation strategy to optimize receptive fields across different frequency ranges, further enhancing the model's representational capacity. Extensive experiments on multimodal models, including CLIP and LLaVA, demonstrate that FreqAdapter significantly improves both performance and efficiency. FreqAdapter improves performance with minimal cost and fast convergence within one epoch. Code is available at https://github.com/Kelvin-ywc/FreqAdapter.

We present FoR-Net, an efficient semantic segmentation framework that focuses on identifying and enhancing hard regions. Instead of relying on heavy global modeling, FoR-Net adopts an efficient strategy that selectively emphasizes informative regions through a learned importance map and a Top-K activation mechanism. Specifically, a selector module predicts region-wise importance, enabling the model to focus on challenging areas such as thin structures and object boundaries. Multi-scale reasoning is achieved using convolutional branches with different receptive fields, allowing diverse spatial context aggregation. We evaluate FoR-Net on the Cityscapes benchmark under limited computational resources. Despite its efficient design and standard training configuration, FoR-Net achieves competitive performance and exhibits improved attention to difficult regions. These results suggest that selective region-focused reasoning can serve as a practical and efficient alternative for semantic segmentation. This work explores region-focused reasoning under resource-constrained settings and provides insights for developing efficient and region-aware segmentation models.

Near-infrared (NIR; a.k.a.\ NIRS) deep-learning studies in chemometrics increasingly report mutually inconsistent conclusions regarding convolutional neural network (CNN) design, including small versus large kernels, shallow versus deep architectures, raw spectra versus preprocessing, and single-domain training versus transfer learning. As a result, the same architecture can appear superior in one study and inferior in another, creating a practical impasse for chemometric practitioners. In this review, we argue that these contradictions are not evidence of irreconcilable methods but a structurally expected consequence of uncontrolled moderating variables. Specifically, we trace recurring disagreements to (i) the indirect nature of Vis--NIR measurement in water-dominated matrices, (ii) mismatch between effective receptive field (ERF) and the width of informative spectral structure, and (iii) validation design (including split strategy, hyperparameter tuning budget, and exposure to deployment-like shifts) acting as a hidden hyperparameter that can dominate model ranking. Building on evidence from published chemometrics and spectroscopy studies, we propose a conditional design framework that links architecture and preprocessing choices to spectral physics, dataset regime, and intended deployment scenario. Overall, the proposed perspective moves DL Chemometrics from template-driven architecture selection toward reproducible, physics-aware, and deployment-aligned model comparison.

Modern vision models achieve remarkable accuracy, but explaining where evidence arises, what the model encodes, and how internal computations assemble that evidence remains fragmented. We introduce an iERF-centric framework that unifies local, global, and mechanistic interpretability around a single analysis unit: the pointwise feature vector (PFV) paired with its instance-specific Effective Receptive Field (iERF). On the local side, Sharing Ratio Decomposition (SRD) expresses each PFV as a mixture of upstream PFVs via sharing ratios and propagates iERFs to construct class-discriminative saliency maps. SRD yields high-resolution, activation-faithful explanations, is robust to targeted manipulation and noise, and remains activation-agnostic across common nonlinearities. For the global view, we introduce Concept-Anchored Feature Explanation (CAFE), which utilizes the iERF as a semantic label, grounding abstract latent vectors in verifiable pixel-level evidence. With CAFE, we address the challenge of non-localized sparse autoencoder latents--especially in Transformers, where early self-attention mixes distant context. To answer how representations are composed through depth, we propose the Interlayer Concept Graph with Interlayer Concept Attribution (ICAT), which quantifies concept-to-concept influence while isolating layer pairs; an interlayer insertion, deletion protocol identifies Integrated Gradients as the most faithful instantiation. Empirically, across ResNet50, VGG16, and ViTs, our framework outperforms baselines in both fidelity and robustness, successfully interprets dispersed SAE features, and exposes dominant concept routes in correct, misclassified, and adversarial cases. Grounded in iERFs, our approach provides a coherent, evidence-backed map from pixels to concepts to decisions.

Feature reconstruction techniques are widely applied for few-shot fine-grained image classification (FSFGIC). Our research indicates that one of the main challenges facing existing feature-based FSFGIC methods is how to choose the size of the receptive field to extract feature descriptors (including spatial and frequency feature descriptors) from different category input images, thereby better performing the FSFGIC tasks. To address this, an adaptive receptive field-based spatial-frequency feature reconstruction network (ARF-SFR-Net) is proposed. The designed ARF-SFR-Net has the capability to adaptively determine receptive field sizes for obtaining spatial and frequency features, and effectively fuse them for reconstruction and FSFGIC tasks. The designed ARF-SFR-Net can be easily embedded into a given episodic training mechanism for end-to-end training from scratch. Extensive experiments on multiple FSFGIC benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed ARF-SFR-Net over state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at: https://github.com/ICL-SUST/ARF-SFR-Net.git.

Underwater images often suffer from severe degradation, such as color distortion, low contrast, and blurred details, due to light absorption and scattering in water. While learning-based methods like CNNs and Transformers have shown promise, they face critical limitations: CNNs struggle to model the long-range dependencies needed for non-uniform degradation, and Transformers incur quadratic computational complexity, making them inefficient for high-resolution images. To address these challenges, we propose Hero-Mamba, a novel Mamba-based network that achieves efficient dual-domain learning for underwater image enhancement. Our approach uniquely processes information from both the spatial domain (RGB image) and the spectral domain (FFT components) in parallel. This dual-domain input allows the network to decouple degradation factors, separating color/brightness information from texture/noise. The core of our network utilizes Mamba-based SS2D blocks to capture global receptive fields and long-range dependencies with linear complexity, overcoming the limitations of both CNNs and Transformers. Furthermore, we introduce a ColorFusion block, guided by a background light prior, to restore color information with high fidelity. Extensive experiments on the LSUI and UIEB benchmark datasets demonstrate that Hero-Mamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our model achieves a PSNR of 25.802 and an SSIM of 0.913 on LSUI, validating its superior performance and generalization capabilities.

Foundation models are used to extract transferable representations from large amounts of unlabeled data, typically via self-supervised learning (SSL). However, many of these models rely on architectures that offer limited interpretability, a critical issue in high-stakes domains such as medical imaging. We propose \model, a foundation model that is interpretable-by-design via a BagNet backbone whose small receptive fields generate class evidence maps that are faithful to the model's decision-making process. Additionally, \model{} incorporates a $2D$ projection layer during pretraining that enables direct visualization of the representation space, providing a dataset-level view of the learned structure including meaningful clinical clusters as well as potential spurious correlations. We trained \model{} on over 800,000 color fundus photographs from various sources to learn generalizable representations for different downstream tasks. Our model achieves performance comparable to RETFound, which has $16\times$ more parameters, while providing interpretable predictions on out-of-distribution data. These results suggest that large-scale SSL pretraining paired with inherent interpretability can lead to robust representations for retinal imaging. Code and pretrained models are available at \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/dual-ifm-3D5A/README.md}{www.anonymous.4open.science/dual-IFM}.

Recent advances in multi-modal detection have significantly improved detection accuracy in challenging environments (e.g., low light, overexposure). By integrating RGB with modalities such as thermal and depth, multi-modal fusion increases data redundancy and system robustness. However, significant challenges remain in effectively extracting task-relevant information both within and across modalities, as well as in achieving precise cross-modal alignment. While CNNs excel at feature extraction, they are limited by constrained receptive fields, strong inductive biases, and difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies. Transformer-based models offer global context but suffer from quadratic computational complexity and are confined to pairwise correlation modeling. Mamba and other State Space Models (SSMs), on the other hand, are hindered by their sequential scanning mechanism, which flattens 2D spatial structures into 1D sequences, disrupting topological relationships and limiting the modeling of complex higher-order dependencies. To address these issues, we propose a multi-modal perception network based on hypergraph theory called M2I2HA. Our architecture includes an Intra-Hypergraph Enhancement module to capture global many-to-many high-order relationships within each modality, and an Inter-Hypergraph Fusion module to align, enhance, and fuse cross-modal features by bridging configuration and spatial gaps between data sources. We further introduce a M2-FullPAD module to enable adaptive multi-level fusion of multi-modal enhanced features within the network, meanwhile enhancing data distribution and flow across the architecture. Extensive object detection experiments on multiple public datasets against baselines demonstrate that M2I2HA achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal object detection tasks.