Independent Anchor Network

Neural architecture search (NAS) evaluates candidate networks, but fully training enough architectures to rank an entire space is expensive. Zero-cost proxies score architectures at initialization, yet their ranking quality varies across search spaces. Learned predictors reduce evaluation cost but typically require fully trained labels or partial-training features for individual candidates. We introduce $\textbf{RiPPLE}$, $\underline{\textbf{R}}$anking v$\underline{\textbf{i}}$a $\underline{\textbf{P}}$refix-$\underline{\textbf{P}}$ropagated $\underline{\textbf{L}}$abel $\underline{\textbf{E}}$xtrapolation, which treats partial training as a source of labels for a small coverage set of anchors. RiPPLE trains these anchors to an early prefix, extrapolates their learning curves to surrogate labels, and propagates the labels over label-free architecture features. The early-training signal remains a label on the anchors rather than a per-candidate feature. Feature, readout, and encoding rules are selected without held-out accuracy and reused across search spaces. We evaluate the method on twelve benchmark cells from four search-space families and on the larger DARTS space. The results examine ranking quality, label efficiency, architecture selection, and the roles of readout, coverage, and propagation. RiPPLE provides a whole-space ranking from a fractional anchor-training budget, with comparisons interpreted under their respective evaluation and cost protocols.

Zero-cost proxies rank architectures cheaply, but their reliability varies across search spaces. We introduce CoRA-NAS (COarse Ranking + Anchor-residual), a two-stage framework combining a static ranking prior with low-cost learning-curve refinement. CoRA-Rank aggregates capacity and structure-at-initialization proxies through an equal-weight log-rank consensus and a target-free consensus gate. CoRA-Refine samples anchors across this prior, extrapolates their early validation curves, and propagates a learned residual correction with an ExtraTrees model. The refinement uses approximately 1% of the cost of fully training the candidate set. Fully trained architecture-accuracy labels are not used to fit the ranker. One configuration is used across spaces, with space-specific architecture encodings. Across NAS-Bench-201, NAS-Bench-101, TransNAS-Bench-101, and NATS-SSS, CoRA-Refine achieves mean Spearman correlations of 0.946, 0.715, 0.786, and 0.894, respectively. Its worst-space correlation of 0.715 is the highest among the compared methods. On NAS-Bench-201/CIFAR-100, its selected architecture reaches 73.32% accuracy, near the reported ground-truth best of 73.37%. On the pure size space, refinement recovers the static prior's shortfall relative to parameter count, while remaining tied with the strongest capacity proxies within noise. The resulting framework combines cross-space ranking robustness with low-cost architecture selection.

Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation requires drones to follow natural-language instructions and navigate through complex urban environments. Accurate navigation relies on both local and global spatial information, which support immediate action grounding and long-horizon path planning, respectively. However, existing zero-shot methods typically operate at a single spatial scale, relying either on local representations constructed online from current observations or on global memories built offline from historical experience. To address this limitation, we propose AirAnchor, a new paradigm that bridges local and global spatial information through spatial anchors and integrates both into a shared navigation framework, enabling comprehensive spatial grounding for decision-making. AirAnchor consists of three core components: (1) Query-Driven Spatial Anchor Grounding, which identifies decision-relevant anchors from visual observations and organizes them into local spatial representations; (2) Persistent Object Spatial Memory, which incrementally maintains an object knowledge base as persistent global spatial memory and retrieves landmark-related spatial priors; and (3) a Spatially-Informed Navigation Agent, which explicitly integrates both local and global spatial information into an agentic framework for decision-making. Extensive experiments on AerialVLN demonstrate that AirAnchor substantially outperforms existing zero-shot baselines, validating the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed paradigm.

Removing a specific individual's information from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often needed after deployment, but existing methods rely on a retain set, which is hardest to obtain at that point, and rebuilding it recreates the privacy exposure that unlearning aims to remove. Forgetting from the forget set alone instead damages the shared visual-language computation, harming perception. We cast retain-free unlearning as a localization problem: causal tracing, weight transplant, and Fisher overlap all point to early-to-mid decoder MLPs as the layers where identity information is stored and, unlike other module families, can be modified without substantially disrupting vision. We turn this into Pathway-Aware Visual-attribute Anchoring (PAVA), which confines updates to these layers and pairs a forget loss with a visual-attribute anchor that preserves image-grounded behavior by distilling the model's own pre-unlearning answers from the forget images alone. On MLLMU-Bench and ReMem, PAVA gives the strongest forget-retain trade-off among forget-set-only methods and remains competitive with retain-based baselines.

Continuous-time 4D reconstruction remains impractical on standalone XR headsets. Per-scene optimization demands deployment-infeasible compute, and lower budgets cause collapse rather than degrade gradually. Feed-forward prediction is fast, but struggle to recover scene-specific detail. We present Amortized Anchor Refinement, which uses a frozen backbone to predict an initial Gaussian representation and a short optimization to specialize it under a fixed compute budget, with a capacity floor preserving representational density. A training-free stage then applies a persistent-homology constraint to prune unstable Gaussians while preserving topologically persistent structures, and streams the resulting trajectories directly as scene flow. On the Stage-Capture benchmark, Amortized Anchor Refinement achieves 24.31$\pm$2.22dB, while our deployment experiments demonstrate reconstruction within the target budget on a single consumer GPU and playback on a standalone XR headset.

We propose a fidelity-constrained framework that anchors the output of a black-box denoiser to its input without retraining and with little additional computation. The method linearly blends the denoised image with the input and selects the maximum blending factor that satisfies a prescribed local fidelity constraint using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) or Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). For PSNR control, a closed-form solution is obtained under a local constant-blending assumption. For SSIM control, we derive a tractable formulation based on inverse SSIM under the same assumption and solve it efficiently using iterative root finding. Experiments on DIV2K images with synthetic Gaussian noise and outputs from Real-ESRGAN and a non-local means denoiser show that the proposed anchoring strategy provides effective fidelity control while balancing denoising performance and statistical naturalness, as measured by the excess kurtosis of residual noise. In particular, SSIM-based anchoring yields more consistent behavior across noise levels than PSNR-based anchoring.

Visual instance segmentation is a challenging problem and becomes even more difficult if objects of interest varies unconstrained in shape. Some objects are well described by a rectangle, however, this is hardly always the case. Consider for instance long, slender objects such as ropes. Anchor-based approaches classify predefined bounding boxes as either negative or positive and thus provide a limited set of shapes that can be handled. Defining anchor-boxes that fit well to all possible shapes leads to an infeasible number of prior boxes. We explore a different approach and propose to train a neural network to compute distance maps along different directions. The network is trained at each pixel to predict the distance to the closest object contour in a given direction. By pooling the distance maps we obtain an approximation to the signed distance function (SDF). The SDF may then be thresholded in order to obtain a foreground-background segmentation. We compare this segmentation to foreground segmentations obtained from the state-of-the-art instance segmentation method YOLACT. On the COCO dataset, our segmentation yields a higher performance in terms of foreground intersection over union (IoU). However, while the distance maps contain information on the individual instances, it is not straightforward to map them to the full instance segmentation. We still believe that this idea is a promising research direction for instance segmentation, as it better captures the different shapes found in the real world.

Acceleration for deterministic root-finding problems has been extensively studied in recent years; specifically, the anchor-based, or Halpern-type methods achieve optimal convergence rates with respect to the operator norm. However, acceleration via these methods does not directly carry over to stochastic setting due to accumulation of errors, unless one enforces diminishing variance via increasing batch sizes or variance reduction techniques. In this work, we show that another class of acceleration, namely the dual-anchor mechanism, extends to the stochastic setting without such error accumulation, in contrast to anchor-based algorithms. Consequently, we cleanly achieve $O(ε^{-3})$ complexity with iteration-independent batch size, without any variance reduction or double-loop recursive regularization, for stochastic root-finding (resp. fixed-point) problems with cocoercivity (resp. square-nonexpansivity) in expectation. For strongly monotone operators, the same algorithm attains a sharper $\widetilde{O} (ε^{-2})$ complexity, nearly matching the lower bound in terms of $ε$-dependence.

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) aims to identify anomalies in unseen domains, a setting that is particularly critical for industrial and medical applications where domain shifts are prevalent. However, most CLIP-based ZSAD methods anchor semantics solely on the text modality, making performance highly sensitive to prompt design and leading to weak visual grounding. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a Dual-Anchor framework that complements conventional text anchors with hierarchical image anchors constructed via a top-down grouping mechanism. This mechanism progressively aggregates local-to-global image features to form normal and abnormal group tokens, which serve as image anchors and act as gating signals in a Group-Gated Token Refiner to enhance the global representation. The refined image anchors are then fused with text prompts to construct dynamic state prompts. By jointly reinforcing visual and textual semantics, our framework stabilizes image-text alignment, reduces prompt dependency, and achieves strong generalization across 8 industrial and 6 medical benchmarks.

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.

Traditional Text-based Person Search (TPS) is typically limited to matching static appearance attributes, severely neglecting dynamic action information. The Text-based Person Anomaly Search (TPAS) task bridges this gap, requiring models to locate micro-level specific abnormal behaviors while matching macro-level appearance of pedestrians. However, current TPAS methods face fundamental limitations: external explicit pose estimators are fragile in unconstrained surveillance scenarios, and implicit learning encounters visual decoupling failure under pixel-level entanglement, causing dominant appearance information to easily swallow and contaminate subtle action features. Furthermore, performing contrastive optimization on hard negative samples (``same appearance, different actions'') in conventional Euclidean spaces induces severe shortcut learning. To address these, we propose the Lightweight Action Inversion and Riemannian rectification network (LightAIR). First, it introduces textual semantic priors as anchors via a lightweight action inversion operator to extract pure action features, thereby overcoming visual-inherent coupling. Subsequently, it employs orthogonal null-space projection to constrain appearance features within the orthogonal complement space of action features, guaranteeing strict forward decoupling. Finally, we designed a gradient rectification module that computes the Riemannian gradient to constrain the backpropagation trajectory, forcing the gradient flow to update strictly along the tangent space that preserves decoupling properties, thereby cutting off harmful shortcuts. Extensive experiments on the widely used TPAS and TIPR datasets demonstrate that LightAIR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/rainy-london/LightAIR

Advanced automated driving presents significant potential to improve modern automotive safety systems, but it depends highly on the reliable activation of restraint systems. Forward-looking sensors are crucial for immediate and precise object detection. Recent developments in automotive radar technology enable detailed environment detection and the recognition of high-resolution features, such as micro-Doppler signatures. Combined with advanced AI techniques, these features significantly enhance object detection and improve the accuracy of kinematic parameter estimation. This is essential for the early and reliable activation of irreversible safety systems, such as smart airbags and adaptive seat belts. Therefore, an anchor-based AI model is presented, designed to process high-resolution radar data with an explicit focus on micro-Doppler signatures to improve pre-crash object detection. Furthermore, these signatures can improve the accuracy of kinematic object parameter estimation and reduce false negatives, especially in the critical near-field. To address the challenges of sparse and fluctuating radar point clouds, an innovative radar-image dilation technique on the feature input channels was developed to amplify local radar patterns, like micro-Doppler features. Therefore, this approach increases the system's reliability and increases its ability to detect objects in pre-crash scenarios despite radar multipath reflections and ghost objects. In order to investigate the applicability and compare the model's performance with advanced automotive radar tracking methods, a radar data set using series sensors and pre-crash relevant scenarios was recorded. The results demonstrate the advantages of the anchor-based AI model over established tracking approaches. It excels at estimating object parameters in dynamic scenarios and underscores its ability to process different data sets effectively.

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) adapts a language model by distilling guidance from a frozen teacher on trajectories sampled from the student. Its effectiveness, however, depends critically on the quality of those trajectories. We show that when student rollouts drift from target trajectories, conditioning the teacher on off-target prefixes substantially weakens its task-relevant supervision. Controlled prefix-corruption experiments expose this failure mode, which we term rollout-conditioned signal degradation. To address this problem, we propose a unified training framework that separates two complementary supervision pathways. The first retains rollout-conditioned distribution matching, providing guidance on states the student actually visits. The second applies supervised cross-entropy on canonical ground-truth contexts, avoiding the incompatibility of imposing target tokens on erroneous rollout prefixes. Token-level rollout-target alignment is used to adapt the strength of the canonical-context anchor, emphasizing it during cold start and relaxing it as rollout quality improves. Experiments across multiple model scales, two task families, and general-reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed approach improves task acquisition over OPSD while preserving general capabilities, resulting in a more favorable empirical plasticity-stability trade-off. These findings identify context quality as a central bottleneck in on-policy self-distillation and demonstrate the value of separating rollout-conditioned guidance from canonical supervision.

Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) accelerate drug discovery, but standard pipelines assume query molecules already exist as graph entities, leaving unregistered molecules disconnected. We address this cold-start challenge, termed the out-of-graph molecule problem, by introducing MolBioKG. This two-layer system grounds unseen molecules in biomedical evidence via multi-resolution structural anchoring. It connects an index of 2.74 million molecules (represented by scaffolds, fragments, functional groups, and fingerprints) to a 9.6-million-edge KG. Given only a SMILES string, MolBioKG retrieves structurally related graph entities and traverses their biomedical neighborhoods without task-specific training. It features two inference mechanisms: static multi-anchor retrieval using Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and Adapt-KG, a tool-using LLM policy for adaptive traversal. Evaluated across in-graph link recovery, complex multi-hop reasoning, and out-of-graph generalization, MolBioKG outperforms strong baselines. Notably, it raises Hits@10 from 0.585 to 0.876 in multi-hop reasoning and out-of-graph target recall from 0.145 to 0.269, all while ensuring predictions retain traceable structural anchors and source-attributed KG evidence.

Deep learning models applied to medical image analysis suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting when continually adapting to new clinical tasks in dynamic environments. Mainstream incremental learning methods typically mitigate this by rehearsing raw historical images. However, this pixel-level rehearsal incurs significant storage overhead, raises privacy concerns, and fails to adequately capture the true data distribution with sparse exemplars. Inspired by human cognitive mechanisms, we propose a novel framework termed Semantic Text-Anchored Incremental Learning (STAIL) for sequential clinical tasks. To overcome the rehearsal bottleneck, STAIL introduces an asymmetric semantic consolidation buffer (SCB). By incorporating a minimal set of image anchors and extensive textual descriptions, the SCB enables dense semantic reconstruction of old tasks at a minimal storage cost. Furthermore, we design an LLM-derived Semantic Anchoring Mechanism (LSAM) that leverages the stable semantic space of frozen large language models as developmental priors. This mechanism explicitly anchors evolving visual features to textual representations, guiding and constraining plasticity and stability at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Extensive experiments across three heterogeneous medical datasets, covering fundus, ultrasound, and X-ray imaging, demonstrate that STAIL acts as a highly effective plug-and-play module. It comprehensively enhances the performance of various existing baselines, achieving average gains of 2.24% in AAA-AUC for sustained performance and 3.55% in BWT-AUC for reduced forgetting. Code is available.

Black-box language-model reliability is commonly pursued by sampling, prompting, voting, verifying, or iteratively revising individual answers. We ask a prior question: \emph{what determines whether a collection of black-box responses is recoverable at all?} We represent responses to typed transformations of a query as a \emph{relational response field} (RRF). Edge transports encode how valid responses must change under paraphrase, scaling, decomposition, refactoring, or other task symmetries; anchors encode independently trusted evidence such as execution or a verifier. For relation operator $D$, anchor operator $A$, and at most $k$ corrupted response nodes, we identify $γ_k(D,A)$ as the intrinsic difficulty of black-box response recovery. It is positive exactly when every $k$-node corruption is identifiable; it gives a deterministic stability bound proportional to $1/γ_k$; and a matching two-point minimax lower bound shows that no estimator can improve this dependence. Thus consistency is not truth: relation-only methods are blind to null directions, including shared hallucinations. We derive sparse field-repair algorithms while separating information-theoretic identifiability from the stronger null-space conditions required by convex optimization. Controlled theorem tests and black-box mathematics/code experiments evaluate four theory-fixed consequences: consistency--truth separation, anchor phase transitions, redundancy saturation, and cross-model, cross-task prediction of repair difficulty. The results support $γ_k(D,A)$ as a measurable property of a response-recovery instance, rather than a score attached to one repair heuristic.

In person re-identification, neighbor-based methods have achieved significant success by interacting with neighbor samples to obtain more robust representations. However, existing methods rely only on affinity relations, causing their success to depend heavily on the reliability of selected neighbors. We find that affinity-only interaction often fails in challenging scenarios due to the inevitable presence of noisy neighbors. To enable effective interactions under noisy neighborhoods, we revisit neighbor-based methods under distinct reliability conditions and propose a novel Adaptive Neighbor Feature Interaction (ANFI) method. The core idea of ANFI is to account for negative effects from noisy neighbors, allowing samples to remain distinguishable from false positive neighbors. Unlike existing methods, ANFI models not only affinity relations but also discrepancy relations, and employs sample-wise adaptive weighting for these two types of relations. Given that capturing negative effects from noisy neighbors differs significantly from traditional relation learning, we derive discrepancy relations from a new neighborhood similarity, which provides more information than pairwise similarity. In addition, we propose Noisy Relation Supervision (NRS) to train ANFI, gradually injecting robustness to noisy relations into the model. Extensive experiments conducted under standard, cross-modal, and cross-domain settings, including comparisons with neighbor-based methods and re-ranking methods, demonstrate the superiority of our method across various neighbor distributions.

Human gaze does more than point to visual targets; it serves as a subtle indicator of social intent within static images, whereas standard models typically process individuals independently, treating gaze as an i.i.d. quantity or predicting social semantics in isolation. Recent multi-person methods attempt to address this but often treat social relations as rigid, post-hoc classifications decoupled from the gaze estimation process. This oversimplification fails to capture the nuanced nature of social intent, which acts as an underlying driver of gaze behavior rather than a secondary categorical output. We address these limitations by proposing ANCHOR, a target-centric paradigm designed to decode gaze-anchored social intent by modeling the joint distribution of visual attention and latent implicit relations. Our approach surfaces these dependencies as the latent structural scaffolding of gaze behavior. The architecture utilizes a relational attention mechanism to capture fine-grained interpersonal links, leveraging feature-wise modulation for efficient multi-person parsing from a single vision backbone. To stabilize the training of this coupled formulation, we implement an optimization synergy to resolve the inherent conflicts between spatial gaze accuracy and latent social reasoning. This approach ensures robust generalization by seeking stable, flat minima while simultaneously harmonizing competing task gradients. We validate our framework on an extended benchmark featuring dense multi-person annotations and novel social influence rankings. Our results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and provide the first quantitative evidence that implicit social hierarchies can be robustly disentangled and learned directly from static gaze patterns.

We introduce a constrained two-view framework for node prediction that aligns structure-conditioned GNN embeddings with a structure-free feature prior learned by an anchor model. Conventional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) couple feature transformation and neighborhood aggregation, which renders them vulnerable to topology noise and heterophilous connections. To decouple this dependency, our framework utilizes an independent anchor network to capture intrinsic attribute features via a self-supervised reconstruction objective. Furthermore, we propose a Channel-Split Adaptive Gated GNN (CSAG-GNN) that dynamically routes representations between global spectral smoothing and local spatial discrimination through a node-wise gating mechanism. We propose a stable cyclic alternating optimization strategy to solve the resulting coupled bi-level objective, preventing mutual representation drift during training. Empirical results on both homophilous and heterophilous benchmarks show balanced performance gains and structural robustness over competitive baselines.

High-quality alpha mattes are notoriously expensive to annotate, creating a fundamental data bottleneck for deep image matting. While prior work attempts to reduce annotation cost using coarser labels like trimaps or masks, they remain reliant on costly per-pixel supervision, limiting scalability and generalization. In this work, we push the boundary further and ask: can we train an automatic matting model using only RGB images, with no manual annotation at all? We answer this by presenting SSMatte, a self-supervised framework that for the first time achieves performance on par with fully-supervised automatic matting. Our key insight is to decompose the problem into semantic anchoring and detail matting. SSMatte first generates a semantic matting prompt from frozen self-supervised ViT features by propagating class-token seeds via a novel, training-efficient semantic anchoring loss based on a generalized Rayleigh quotient. This prompt then anchors a detail matting network, which is optimized via a fixed-point-based loss that enforces alpha-RGB consistency. Extensive experiments show SSMatte outperforms prior weakly-supervised methods, matches the performance of fully-supervised models on portrait benchmarks, and demonstrates favorable scaling and generalization behaviors with additional data. Our work pushes automatic matting to an fresh, fully annotation-free paradigm. Code will be available.

In real-world multimodal web scenarios, graph-structured data often arrives in a streaming manner, making graph continual learning a crucial paradigm for continuously modeling such evolving structures. However, existing graph continual learning methods still face two fundamental challenges. 1) semantic-structural separation, where the graph-based methods excel at modeling topological relationships but neglect deep semantics. 2) imbalanced knowledge transfer, where existing models fail to effectively leverage general knowledge gained from early tasks to benefit subsequent new tasks. To address above issues, we propose a novel framework, \textbf{UN}leash Large Language Models PotentIal for Graph ConTinual Learning (UNIT). By fine-tuning large language model only on the first task, we bridge the distributional gap between the pre-trained LLM corpus and the target task dataset to enhance the adaptability of LLMs for graph-structured tasks. Meanwhile, we propose an uncertain-aware anchor generation mechanism to effectively preserve representative knowledge across tasks, avoiding the neglect of universal knowledge learned from previous tasks. Additionally, we introduce structural confluence modeling to explicitly integrates graph topology information into semantic information, enhancing the collaborative capabilities between semantic understanding and structural modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the graph continual learning task.

Strong mapped-region thermal visual place recognition (VPR) does not ensure safe rejection of unmapped queries. We identify and quantify this gap in AnyThermal: high Map-In retrieval accuracy coexists with confident false loop closures in Map-Out. We address it with ROUTE-MHT, a multimodal transformer guardrail. Causal motion forms a route-local candidate pool beyond the frontend's Top-$K$. Closed-form $\text{SE}(2)$ SVD verifies candidates, while frozen visual features, nine-dimensional SVD residuals, and motion proxies enter a masked multi-head transformer (MHT). Their interactions yield a contextual confidence correction to reject unsupported matches without altering geometric pose alignment. We collect an indoor thermal dataset with a physical mobile robot (Dataset-A), forming five same-day/cross-day map-query pairs; the protected interface reaches macro R@1@5m of .610/.861. Dataset-B comprises 20 map-hole scenarios derived from public STheReO-KAIST recordings. Across five scenario-held-out folds and three seeds, ROUTE-MHT reduces FPR from .116 for the SVD baseline to .061 (paired 95% CI [-.100, -.014]), while improving AUC from .945 to .967 and recall from .884 to .914. Public benchmark transfer checks on STheReO-KAIST, MS2, and IRSLAM-KRI extend the evaluation under their released metric or route-progress protocols.

Monocular depth foundations predict domain-general relative depth but lack absolute scale; a handful of sparse metric anchors from a range sensor can calibrate them to metric depth, an attractive alternative to metric-supervised training. Existing sparse-anchor calibration methods, however, assume the anchors are clean, whereas real sensors produce outliers that are present with the wrong value -- time-of-flight multipath, mixed pixels -- not merely missing. We show that the established residual-on-CFA calibration recipe collapses under such outliers, and that the strongest publicly deployed method, VI-Depth, has a structural multipath blind spot: robust to missing anchors, it falls behind an unprotected baseline on three of four datasets when anchors are present but wrong. We propose Multipath-Robust Anchor Calibration (MRAC), a parameter-free, inference-time wrapper that gates anchors by foundation consistency -- a Theil--Sen fit and a median-absolute-deviation test against the foundation's own relative-depth ordering -- before a single call to the calibration head. MRAC adds no learned parameters, runs its selection in $\approx 50\,μ$s on CPU, and serves anchor budgets $K \in [5,200]$ from one checkpoint. On a $320$-cell benchmark with a same-backbone, same-architecture control, MRAC strictly wins $84\%$ of same-backbone cells across all four outlier families and, against VI-Depth, wins all twelve corrupted multipath cells and all sixteen KITTI cells, reducing KITTI multipath AbsRel by $3.2\times$ ($0.489$ to $0.151$) at zero retraining.

This work introduces holo-captioning, a novel task that strives to seek the text equivalent of 3D scenes. As the initial step, we formulate holo-captioning as generating a structured textual description that comprehensively depicts all entities within a 3D scene -- including their semantic tags, spatial locations, attributes, and inter-entity relations. To tackle this challenging task, we first develop an effective captioning engine to produce detailed descriptions of individual entity instances and instance pairs, and contribute a large-scale benchmark comprising over 15K scenes for training and evaluation. Building upon this foundation, we propose HoloScribe, a novel model that features an instance-aware decoupled pipeline for generating structured holo-captions, and further incorporates anchor-aware instance linking to identify relational instance pairs. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive evaluation metric named HoloScore, and provide a human-curated test set to ensure reliable model assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that HoloScribe significantly outperforms state-of-the-art 3D dense captioners and 3D LLM generalists, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/holocap/

Table extraction from business documents relies on a cascaded pipeline where Table Detection (TD) first localizes tables and Table Structure Recognition (TSR) then recovers their internal layout. Building task-specific training sets for this pipeline is costly, particularly for TSR which requires fine-grained structural annotations. Active learning (AL) can reduce this annotation burden, yet most AL strategies are designed for single-model tasks and do not account for inter-stage dependencies in cascaded architectures. In this work, we present the first adaptation of Uncertainty Herding (UHerding), a hybrid coverage-uncertainty sampling method originally proposed for image classification, to cascaded object detection pipelines. We propose two pipeline-aware extensions that exploit the TD-to-TSR dependency: RankFusion adds dual-manifold coverage over both detection and structure representation spaces, while CAPA further incorporates stage-dependent gating and per-task uncertainty calibration. Extensive experiments across two public (PubTables-1M and FinTabNet) and two private table extraction datasets, with various annotation budgets (from 71 to 500 documents) show that UHerding generalizes well to table extraction, outperforming each baseline. Among pipeline-aware variants, RankFusion achieves higher expected gains but at the cost of greater variance, while CAPA emerges as the most consistent strategy, outperforming standard UHerding on three out of four datasets.

View-based point cloud completion aims to recover a complete 3D shape from a partial point cloud, guided by a single-view image. However, existing approaches often suffer from limited performance due to weak modality alignment and limited self-geometry enhancement. To overcome these challenges, we propose a unified geometry-aware framework that integrates efficient modality alignment and adaptive geometry enhancement, mainly to address cross-modal geometric inconsistency of view-guided point cloud completion. Specifically, we propose a geometry-aware modality alignment by integrating a shared self-attention Transformer and cross-modality reconstruction supervision, which aims to bring features of the image and point cloud close to each other in a shared latent space describing the 3D object. To enhance the perception of global shape and local geometric details, we propose an adaptive geometry-aware self-attention module, which simultaneously considers local geometry-aware attention computation and the spatially-variant feature fusion. In addition, we apply a geometry-perceptive anchor refinement module to reorganize the anchor points (representing a local region of the shape) under appropriate supervision, further boosting the completion performance of our method. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over existing approaches. Our code will be available at https://github.com/weizequan/MAGE.

Vision foundation models such as SAM 3 can provide transferable object-level structure across diverse surgical video conditions, but segmentation outputs do not explicitly encode the action-conditioned semantics that define functional surgical landmarks. Estimating instrument extent and geometry differs from localizing the tip or anchor relevant to clipping, grasping, or dissecting. We investigate vision foundation model-enabled sparse action-aware landmark localization, using zero-shot, point-prompted structural masks to provide dense instrument-level context without manual pixel-level mask annotations. We propose a lightweight refinement framework that uses SAM 3 as a structural prior. A coarse multi-frame network predicts tip and anchor prompts, generating non-oracle masks that are fused with visual and heatmap features to refine functional landmark predictions. We compare direct mask-augmented supervision, prediction-derived mask-prior refinement, and auxiliary mask supervision to examine how vision foundation model-derived structure should enter a precision-oriented localization system. Experiments on 7,867 clips from 60 surgical videos spanning YouTube, Cholec80, HeiChole, SurgVU, and CRCD evaluate the approach under heterogeneous conditions. Without manual pixel-level mask annotations for training, the proposed model achieves overall F1 scores of 72.4% for tip and 58.0% for anchor localization. Directly imposing masks on heatmap targets biases learning toward broad tool regions, whereas prediction-derived priors and auxiliary supervision provide effective intermediate structural guidance for action-dependent landmark prediction.

Large-scale multimodal models (LMMs) have achieved superior performance in visual recognition by synergizing information across diverse, massive-scale paired modalities. In real-world scenarios, however, missing-modality inputs are ubiquitous, causing models optimized for modality-complete data to exhibit precipitous performance degradation. Existing research has introduced prompt learning to mitigate this issue, typically by generating dynamic prompts from instance-level features, regardless of whether the input modalities are complete or partially absent. However, such input-conditioned strategies are hindered by the escalating unreliability of instance-level features; as higher missing rates increase the proportion of incomplete modalities, the resulting instability in prompt learning limits the model's performance. To address this limitation, we hypothesize that learnable latent prompts themselves encapsulate stable, modality-intrinsic priors that are decoupled from corrupted inputs. Consequently, we propose a novel paradigm: Learning from Reliable Latent Prompts. Unlike prior methods, we model input-agnostic learnable prompts as stable latent anchors that enable robust guidance and effective cross-modal knowledge compensation, even under extreme missing rates (e.g., 90%). Empirical results across three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our "learn-from-latent-prompts" approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of missing-modality scenarios. Extensive experiments further confirm the effectiveness of this paradigm in providing a robust solution to the missing-modality problem.

In industrial environments, new product categories arrive sequentially, requiring continual anomaly detection without access to past data. Normalizing Flows (NFs) provide exact density estimation but suffer from catastrophic forgetting as parameter updates across tasks distort the density manifold. While parameter isolation can prevent interference, it must preserve the strict invertibility and Jacobian validity of NFs. To satisfy these requirements, we exploit the inherent property that affine coupling layers maintain transformation validity regardless of subnet parameterization. Based on this, we propose DeCoFlow, which decomposes subnets into a frozen universal base and task-specific low-rank adapters to isolate updates. We further introduce Task-Specific Alignment, Auxiliary Coupling Layers, and Tail-Aware Loss to compensate for frozen-base rigidity. DeCoFlow achieves state-of-the-art image-level AUROCs of 98.40% on MVTec-AD and 93.00% on VisA, while maintaining parameter-level zero forgetting (0.00% FM under correct routing) with only 2.27M parameters per task.

Vision-language models (VLMs) often underperform on evidence intensive tasks because decisive visual evidence are small, localized, and easy to overlook, leading to failures in evidence readout even when high-level reasoning is intact. Prior inference-time visual interventions can improve grounding without retraining, but they are largely open-loop and lack a mechanism to verify whether highlighted evidence is actually used. We study answer-span prediction entropy as a model-internal feedback signal and show that naive entropy minimization is ambiguous, since low entropy may arise from evidence-grounded confidence or shortcut collapse. To resolve this ambiguity, we introduce low-entropy anchors and an entropy-shaping objective that reduces answer uncertainty while preserving baseline high-confidence tokens. We instantiate this principle in SPOT-E, a plug-and-play test-time method that produces question-conditioned spotlights, optimized per instance via light-weight tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Across all benchmarks and different VLM families, SPOT-E yields consistent gains and improved robustness under visual corruptions. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YinBo0927/SPOT-E

Recent visual imitation learning systems have widely adopted multi-camera setups with wrist-mounted cameras as the de facto standard. However, manipulation from a single global view remains challenging, as the policy should capture fine-grained interaction details and identify task-relevant regions without local wrist views. To address this challenge, we present Spatially Conditioned Diffusion Policy (SCDP), a diffusion-based visuomotor policy that achieves precise and robust manipulation in a single-camera setting. Our key idea is that end-effector trajectories can serve as visual attention anchors that reflect task-relevant regions. Building on this idea, SCDP consists of two key components: (i) a visual encoder that produces multi-scale feature maps to capture both broader context and fine-grained visual features, and (ii) a spatial conditioning module that samples point-wise features along intermediate end-effector trajectories in the diffusion loop. Extensive simulation experiments show that SCDP consistently outperforms strong single-view baselines and achieves performance comparable to multi-camera baselines. Real-world experiments further demonstrate precise manipulation and robustness to visual distractors, highlighting the potential of single-camera imitation learning.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most widely used unsupervised dimension reduction techniques. We study PCA for data from multiple related domains. Since principal components generally differ across domains, one way to obtain a shared low-rank embedding is to perform PCA on the pooled data. However, this approach can focus on spurious directions that exhibit high variation in only a few domains. To find a robust embedding that still explains most variance in unseen but similar domains, we propose instead to focus on shared directions of variation. To this end, we introduce Anchor PCA which trades off overall explained variance with agreement between the shared and domain-specific low-rank embeddings. Anchor PCA amounts to PCA on a modified target matrix and thus can be solved efficiently. Moreover, we show that Anchor PCA recovers a maximal invariant subspace and admits a minimax reconstruction interpretation under bounded domain-specific covariance inflations. On simulated and real-world gas sensor data with temporal drift, we demonstrate, respectively, that Anchor PCA recovers the maximally invariant subspace and yields embeddings that explain more variance on unseen domains than the pooling baseline and a worst-case alternative. Taken together, these findings establish Anchor PCA as a promising approach to robust unsupervised dimension reduction from multi-domain data.

Agents are widely deployed as assistants over documents, tools, and code. However, they typically act only on explicit user requests, which surface only the problems the user has noticed, while many other important problems coexist, hidden in plain sight, within the broader user context, with their total number unknown in advance. We frame this as the task of discovering multiple hidden problems from context, in which coexisting problems should be uncovered, grounded in supporting evidence, and paired with concrete actions. To this end, we introduce TIDE, a template-guided iterative framework with two complementary mechanisms. Specifically, motivated by the observation that single-pass prediction anchors on the most salient cases and yields generic claims, we propose iterative discovery, which surfaces a small batch of candidates per round while conditioning on what has already been found, so subsequent rounds extend coverage; and thought templates, reusable schemas distilled from previously solved cases that specify what contextual signals to attend to and how to connect them, anchoring each prediction in a recognizable problem class. We validate TIDE on two realistic settings, personal workspaces and software repositories, across four model backbones, showing substantial gains over single-shot and parallel multi-agent baselines on task coverage, identification, and resolution.

Catastrophic forgetting is often framed as a representational problem: after sequential training, a model appears to lose the features that supported performance on earlier tasks. We challenge the stronger form of this view. Across controlled continual-learning settings, we find that a significant portion of apparent forgetting can be attributed to interface drift between internal stages rather than permanent erasure of task-relevant computation. We study this phenomenon through a stitched evaluation protocol that combines early computation from a post-update network with late computation from its predecessor, optionally mediated by a compact, task-specific transport key. We describe transport keys at a systems level as compact interface-alignment operators estimated from a small set of paired anchor activations and evaluated through model stitching. On split CIFAR-100 with a ResNet-style network, transport keys recover most of the original Task A performance after sequential training on Task B. On a compact vision transformer, we observe a similar recovery pattern. These results suggest that continual learning may require better mechanisms for indexing and re-accessing latent computations, not only methods that prevent weight change.

Independently trained neural models typically converge to incompatible latent representations, creating a fundamental barrier to highly modular AI systems. While Relative Representations (RR) address this by mapping absolute coordinates to a shared space defined by similarities to common anchor points, traditional implementations rely on randomly sampled anchors and cosine similarity, which frequently fail to capture the anisotropic geometries of modern architectures like Transformers. In this work, we propose a robust framework for cross-model communication based on two improvements. We learn anchors as robust semantic prototypes and utilize a geometry-aware similarity metric which preserves discriminative magnitude information and is invariant to affine shifts. Our approach demonstrates significant gains in performance and consistency across vision and language tasks. Notably, it enables nearly lossless information transfer and stable zero-shot communication even between highly heterogeneous architectures, such as small language models of varying scales.

AI model hubs provide access to a rapidly growing collection of powerful pre-trained models, enabling off-the-shelf mixture-of-experts systems with different routing strategies. However, this rapid growth poses two fundamental challenges: scaling model selection across thousands of experts and continually updating routing mechanisms as new models and tasks are introduced. In this paper, we formalise this setting as Continual Model Routing (CMR) and propose CMRBench, a new large-scale benchmark simulating realistic hub expansion and including over 2,000 candidate models. Finally, we introduce CARvE, a contrastive embedding approach for efficient continual model routing via checkpoint-based anchoring and structured replay. Extensive empirical results and ablations show that CARvE significantly outperforms zero-shot retrieval, fine-tuning, and adapter-merging baselines in model, family, and domain-level accuracy.

Fast linear algebra in deep learning usually comes with a choice: fixed geometry and exact computation, as in the Fourier transform, or adaptive geometry paid for by dense parameters, random features, or low-rank surrogates. To move beyond this trade-off, we introduce LAPLEX, a class of exact, trainable (phased) Laplace-kernel operators. A LAPLEX layer is a typically full-rank dense matrix, implicitly defined by learnable coordinate anchors, with FFT-like scaling. Consequently, it supports trainable matrix--vector operations at vector dimensions up to $10^9$ on modern GPUs. As a neural layer, it yields compact projections and classification heads interpretable as soft, trainable routing models. The same primitive also serves as an efficient Gram operator, enabling high-dimensional covariance models on flattened images of dimension $3 \cdot 10^6$ that preserve visible spatial structure without imposing convolutional bias. These applications reflect a single principle: dense geometry can be learned without storing a dense matrix, which enables data-adaptive global interactions in regimes where ordinary dense layers are out of reach. In this sense, LAPLEX separates expressivity from storage cost: it behaves like a dense trainable matrix, but is represented and applied through a small structured set of parameters.

Continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) updates a pretrained model online on an unlabeled, non-stationary stream while anchoring it to a frozen source checkpoint. This anchor is useful only when the source remains reliable. On CCC-Hard, however, a ResNet-50 source falls to approximately $1.3\%$ top-$1$ accuracy, while existing source-anchored CTTA methods continue applying the same anchor strength. We call this failure mode blind anchoring and propose RMemSafe, a reliability-gated extension of ROID that uses the frozen source's normalized predictive entropy to attenuate all explicit source-coupled uses in the objective. When the source posterior approaches uniformity, the gate closes: the source anchor and agreement filter vanish, and the objective reduces to a source-agnostic fallback comprising ROID's base losses plus marginal calibration. Combined with ASR, RMemSafe achieves the lowest error on $8$ of $9$ matched-split continual-corruption cells and is the best reset-based method on all $9$, improving ROID+ASR by $1.05$~pp on ResNet-50 and $0.48$~pp on ViT-B/16. A controlled source-degradation sweep shows a $1.13{\times}$ shallower harm slope than ROID+ASR, consistent with the graceful-decay prediction. The entropy gate detects high-entropy source collapse, not confidently wrong low-entropy sources; this scope is explicitly evaluated and discussed.

Learning-assisted algorithm design often has to make reliable search decisions under small evaluation budgets, where committing to a single metaheuristic can be unreliable. We propose WASHH, a Whale-guided Adaptive Selection Hyper-Heuristic for continuous black-box optimization. WASHH uses WOA as the main exploitation backbone, but treats PSO-style memory, GWO-style leader averaging, DE-style variation, local coordinate search, and anchor-guided refinement as selectable search behaviors. An online reward controller allocates evaluations according to observed improvements, while anchor refinement exploits inexpensive reference configurations such as box centers or default model settings without bypassing black-box evaluation. On ten 30-dimensional benchmark functions with 10 independent runs and 12,000 evaluations, WASHH achieves the best average rank, 1.10, and is best or tied best on all ten functions. It strictly improves over WOA on eight functions and ties WOA at the numerical optimum on Rastrigin and Griewank. We further study SVC hyperparameter configuration for breast cancer diagnosis under a 300-evaluation budget. WASHH obtains the lowest mean validation log loss among the compared optimizers, suggesting that anchor-aware selection hyper-heuristics are a practical lightweight direction for LEAD systems.

Model merging aims to combine multiple task-specific expert models into a single model without joint retraining, offering a practical alternative to multi-task learning when data access or computational budget is limited. Existing methods, however, face two key limitations: (1) they overlook the valuable inductive bias of strong anchor models and estimate the merged weights from scratch, and (2) they rely on a shared hyperparameter setting across different modules of the network, lacking a global optimization strategy. This paper introduces Bayesian Model Merging (BMM), a plug-and-play bi-level optimization framework, where the inner level formulates the model merging as an activation-based Bayesian regression under a strong prior induced by an anchor model, yielding an efficient closed-form solution; and the outer level leverages a Bayesian optimization procedure to search module-specific hyperparameters globally based on a small validation set. Furthermore, we reveal a key alignment between activation statistics and task vectors, enabling us to derive a data-free variant of BMM that estimates the Gram matrix for regression without any auxiliary data. Across extensive benchmarks, including up to 20-task merging in vision and 5-task merging in language, BMM consistently outperforms all plug-and-play anchor baselines (e.g., TA, WUDI-Merging, and TSV). In particular, on the ViT-L/14 benchmark for 8-task merging, a single merged model reaches 95.1, closely matching the average performance of eight task-specific experts (95.8).

Large language models from different families use different hidden dimensions, tokenizers, and training procedures, making behavioral directions difficult to compare or transfer across models. We introduce an anchor-projection framework that maps hidden representations from each model into a shared anchor coordinate space (ACS). Behavioral directions extracted from source models are projected into ACS and averaged into a canonical direction. For a new model, the canonical direction is reconstructed into its native hidden space using only anchor activations, without fine-tuning or target-specific direction extraction. We evaluate five instruction-tuned model families and ten behavioral axes. We find that same-axis directions align tightly across the Llama-Qwen-Mistral-Phi (LQMP) cluster in ACS. This shared structure transfers to downstream tasks. For the aligned LQMP cluster, held-out targets achieve (0.83) ten-way detection accuracy and (0.95) mean binary AUROC, while canonical steering induces refusal-rate shifts of up to +0.46% under distribution shift. Sensitivity analyses show that two source models and small anchor pools already suffice to approximate transferable directions. Overall, ACS provides a novel perspective on cross-family interpretability, revealing that representation-level transfer remains robust across model families.

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) typically produces depth estimations that are defined up to an unknown scale or shift. When only sparse metric anchors are available, recovering accurate metric depth becomes challenging yet necessary for practical applications. We address this problem by formulating metric depth recovery as image-adaptive scale field modeling. Instead of directly correcting the depth, we reformulate the correction as a low-dimensional linear combination of image-adaptive basis maps. These maps are derived from semantic and geometric cues encoded in the MDE estimations and intermediate representations. The weights of basis maps are efficiently determined from sparse metric anchors via a least-squares problem. This formulation yields improved metric depth accuracy, strong robustness under extreme anchor sparsity, and an interpretable decomposition of spatial scale variations. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and representative MDE models demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of our approach.

Post-training large language models (LLMs) often suffers from catastrophic forgetting, where improvements on a target objective degrade previously acquired capabilities. Recent evidence suggests that this phenomenon is primarily driven by excessive distributional drift during optimization. Motivated by this perspective, we propose Anchored Learning, a simple framework that explicitly controls distributional updates during offline fine-tuning via a dynamically evolving moving anchor. Instead of matching a fixed reference distribution, the anchor interpolates between the current model and a frozen reference to construct an intermediate target that the model distills toward, transforming global fine-tuning into a sequence of local trust-region updates in distribution space. Theoretically, we prove this anchor-based update admits a linear KL-divergence upper bound per iteration, ensuring a stable transition between model distributions. Extensive experiments on iGSM, MedCalc, and IFEval show that Anchored Learning consistently lies on the Pareto frontier of gain-stability trade-offs, achieving near-optimal performance improvements while substantially reducing degradation compared to strong baselines. For example, while standard SFT suffers from over 53% performance degradation on iGSM and MedCalc, Anchored Learning slashes this drop to under 5% while maintaining near-optimal gains (e.g., 75.2% on iGSM).

Clinicians trace cephalometric radiographs following a structured anatomical workflow, yet no prior system encodes this into computation. We present a five-phase anatomy-guided pipeline producing confidence-weighted spatial priors that shape HRNet-W32 training, achieving 1.04 mm mean radial error on 25 landmarks across 1,502 radiographs from 7+ imaging devices. A training x inference prior matrix isolates the mechanism: anatomical priors maintain a 1% validation-to-test gap versus 88% without priors (1.94 mm), despite identical validation convergence. The matrix establishes that all trained models are inference-independent, the expanded architecture alone provides no benefit, random priors yield partial but unstable improvement (1.72 mm), and only image-specific anatomically correct priors produce the 1.04 mm result -- functioning as a training-time regularizer requiring no automated prior generation at deployment. Five-fold cross-validation (p=0.0015), patient-level permutation testing (p<0.0001, n=151), quantified Grad-CAM analysis (88% vs. 74% in-zone activation, p<0.001), and clinical measurement validation (skeletal classification kappa=0.79-0.84, zero Class II<->III reversals, ICC>0.95) provide converging evidence. Cross-domain experiments on echocardiography, cervical spine, and hand radiography support the hypothesis that prior effectiveness scales with the spatial entropy of the landmark distribution.

Medium-horizon Alzheimer's disease progression prediction is difficult because future clinical scores can remain tied to baseline severity, while biomarker histories are irregular and incompletely observed. We develop an anchor-based analysis of 24-month Clinical Dementia Rating Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB) change using harmonized Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) tables. Each labeled sample is anchored at a mild cognitive impairment visit, uses only clinical and biomarker history observed at or before that anchor, and defines the response as CDR-SB at the future visit closest to 24 months within an 18--30 month window minus anchor CDR-SB. The analytic cohort contains 2,600 labeled anchors from 858 participants and 7,276 longitudinal rows. We propose a residual gap-aware transformer that combines a mixed-effects statistical reference with transformer-based residual learning from pre-anchor clinical and biomarker histories. The model uses participant-level random intercepts in the mixed-effects reference, observation-level triplet tokenization for irregular histories, and a learned nonnegative time-gap penalty inside self-attention. We compare the proposed model with a Bayesian-information-criterion-selected linear mixed-effects baseline, GRU-D, and STraTS under repeated participant-level train--test splits. Across five participant-level random seeds, the proposed model achieves the best mean test performance across all reported metrics, reducing MSE by 13.1% and increasing prediction--observation correlation by 26.4% relative to the mixed-effects baseline. It also improves over both GRU-D and STraTS in mean error and correlation. These results show that statistical anchoring and gap-aware residual learning provide a useful structure for medium-horizon Alzheimer's disease progression prediction.

Chest X-ray classification suffers from severe class imbalance where gradient updates bias toward majority classes, causing feature drift and poor performance on rare but critical pathologies. We propose a Momentum-Anchored Multi-Scale Fusion Network that uses exponential moving averages (EMA) as a temporal anchoring mechanism to stabilize feature representations under long-tailed distributions. Our approach applies selective momentum updates to the final expansion block of an EfficientNet backbone, creating a slowly-evolving reference branch that resists gradient-induced drift while preserving discriminative patterns for minority classes. Combined with multi-scale spatial fusion ($1\times 1$, $3 \times 3$, $5 \times 5$ convolutions), this anchoring strategy maintains representational stability throughout training. On ChestX-ray14, our method achieves 0.8682 average AUC, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches and showing particular improvements on rare pathologies like Hernia (0.9470) and Pneumonia (0.8165). The results demonstrate that momentum anchoring effectively counters feature instability in long-tailed medical image classification.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world systems, they must support post-hoc removal of specific content to meet privacy and governance requirements. This motivates selective unlearning, which suppresses information about a particular entity or topic while preserving the LLM's general utility. However, most existing LLM unlearning methods require access to the original training corpus and rely on output-level refusal tuning or broad gradient updates, creating a tension among unlearning strength, non-target preservation, and data availability. We propose Geometric Unlearning (GU), an approach that operates directly on the model's prompt-conditioned hidden states without access to the original training corpus. Specifically, GU distills a compact, low-rank safe-behavior subspace from a small set of safe reference prompts and uses lightweight anchor-in-context synthetic prompts to trigger localized, projection-based alignment of hidden representations to this safe subspace. A teacher-distillation regularizer on synthetic non-target anchors further reduces collateral drift. Across privacy-oriented unlearning benchmarks (ToFU and UnlearnPII), GU achieves strong target suppression with minimal impact on non-target performance, demonstrating that effective unlearning can be achieved with minimal synthetic data.

Word embeddings are fundamental to natural language processing, yet traditional approaches represent each word with a single vector, creating representational bottlenecks for polysemous words and limiting semantic expressiveness. While multi-anchor representations have shown promise by representing words as combinations of multiple vectors, they have been limited to small-scale models due to computational inefficiency and lack of integration with modern transformer architectures. We introduce Adaptive Dictionary Embeddings (ADE), a framework that successfully scales multi-anchor word representations to large language models. ADE makes three key contributions: (1) Vocabulary Projection (VP), which transforms the costly two-stage anchor lookup into a single efficient matrix operation; (2) Grouped Positional Encoding (GPE), a novel positional encoding scheme where anchors of the same word share positional information, preserving semantic coherence while enabling anchor-level variation; and (3) context-aware anchor reweighting, which leverages self-attention to dynamically compose anchor contributions based on sequence context. We integrate these components into the Segment-Aware Transformer (SAT), which provides context-aware reweighting of anchor contributions at inference time. We evaluate ADE on AG News and DBpedia-14 text classification benchmarks. With 98.7% fewer trainable parameters than DeBERTa-v3-base, ADE surpasses DeBERTa on DBpedia-14 (98.06% vs. 97.80%) and approaches it on AG News (90.64% vs. 94.50%), while compressing the embedding layer over 40x -- demonstrating that multi-anchor representations are a practical and parameter-efficient alternative to single-vector embeddings in modern transformer architectures.

RGB-Thermal (T) crowd counting aims to integrate visible-spectrum and thermal infrared information to improve the robustness of crowd density estimation in complex scenes. Although existing studies generally improve counting accuracy through cross-modal feature fusion, most current methods rely on implicit cross-modal fusion strategies and lack explicit modeling of local spatial discrepancies as well as fine-grained characterization of modality reliability at the positional level, thereby limiting the accuracy and interpretability of the fusion process. To address these issues, this paper proposes a two-stage fusion framework, RACANet, a Reliability-Aware Crowd Anchor Network for RGB-T crowd counting. First, we introduce a lightweight cross-modal alignment pretraining stage, which explicitly learns cross-modal semantic correspondences through crowd-prior supervision and local bidirectional soft matching. Then, based on the priors learned during pretraining, a Local Anchor Fusion Module (LAFM) is introduced in the formal training stage. This module generates local semantic anchors by aggregating features from highly reliable regions and further enables adaptive pixel-level feature redistribution with a local attention mechanism. In addition, we propose a discrepancy-aware consistency constraint to dynamically coordinate the reliability of regions where modal representations are consistent. Experiments conducted on two widely used benchmark datasets, RGBT-CC and Drone-RGBT, demonstrate that RACANet outperforms existing methods. The anonymous code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RACANet-9985.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) has attracted significant attention due to its flexible multimodal query method, yet its development is severely constrained by the Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) problem. Most existing robust learning methods rely on the "small loss hypothesis", but the unique semantic ambiguity in NTC, such as "partial matching", invalidates this assumption, leading to unreliable noise identification. This entraps the model in a self dependent vicious cycle where the learner is intertwined with the arbiter, ultimately causing catastrophic "representation pollution". To address this critical challenge, we propose a novel "Expert-Proxy-Diversion" decoupling paradigm, named Air-Know (ArbIteR calibrated Knowledge iNternalizing rObust netWork). Air-Know incorporates three core modules: (1) External Prior Arbitration (EPA), which utilizes Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as an offline expert to construct a high precision anchor dataset; (2) Expert Knowledge Internalization (EKI), which efficiently guides a lightweight proxy "arbiter" to internalize the expert's discriminative logic; (3) Dual Stream Reconciliation (DSR), which leverages the EKI's matching confidence to divert the training data, achieving a clean alignment stream and a representation feedback reconciliation stream. Extensive experiments on multiple CIR benchmark datasets demonstrate that Air-Know significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods under the NTC setting, while also showing strong competitiveness in traditional CIR.