HiMu: Hierarchical Multimodal Frame Selection for Long Video Question Answering

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2603.18558v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-form video question answering requires reasoning over extended temporal contexts, making frame selection a critical bottleneck for multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) bound by finite context windows. Within the controlled frame-budget regime that governs practical deployment, prior selectors score frames against a single global query embedding; as a result, compositional multimodal questions that involve temporal ordering or cross-modal cues such as "what happens on screen right after the narrator mentions the reaction?" are flattened into a representation that loses sub-event ordering and modality bindings. We introduce HiMu, a training-free framework for compositional multimodal frame selection. A single text-only LLM call decomposes the query into a hierarchical logic tree whose leaves are atomic predicates, each routed to a lightweight expert spanning vision (CLIP, open-vocabulary detection, OCR) and audio (speech recognition and non-speech sound matching). Expert signals are normalized, smoothed to align across modalities, and composed bottom-up through fuzzy-logic operators that enforce temporal sequencing and adjacency, yielding a continuous per-frame satisfaction curve. Under the standard 16-frame budget on Video-MME, LongVideoBench, and HERBench-Lite, HiMu achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among frame selection methods and improves over uniform sampling across seven diverse MLLMs as a drop-in module, matching the accuracy of uniform sampling at 4x its frame budget, without retraining and without multiple iterative MLLM calls during selection.
Dan Ben-Ami, Gabriele Serussi, Kobi Cohen, Chaim Baskin

ArrayTac: A Closed-Loop Piezoelectric Tactile Platform for Continuously Tunable Rendering of Shape, Stiffness, and Friction

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2603.13829v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human touch depends on the integration of shape, stiffness, and friction, yet existing tactile displays cannot render these cues together as continuously tunable, high-fidelity signals for intuitive perception. We present ArrayTac, a closed-loop piezoelectric tactile platform that simultaneously renders these three tactile dimensions with continuous tunability on a 4 by 4 actuator array. Each unit integrates a three-stage micro-lever amplifier with end-effector Hall-effect feedback, enabling up to 5 mm displacement, an array refresh rate greater than 500 Hz, and a closed-loop bandwidth of 123 Hz. In psychophysical experiments, naive participants identified three-dimensional shapes and distinguished multiple stiffness and friction levels through touch alone without training. We further demonstrate image-to-touch rendering from an RGB image and remote palpation of a medical-grade breast tumor phantom across a distance of more than 1,000 km, in which all 11 participants correctly identified the number and type of tumors with a sub-centimeter mean localization error. Together, these results establish ArrayTac as a programmable multidimensional tactile rendering platform that bridges digital representations, physical environments, and human tactile perception, enabling intuitive tactile communication between humans and machines.
Tianhai Liang, Shiyi Guo, Baiye Cheng, Zhengrong Xue, Han Zhang, Huazhe Xu

CAMEL-CLIP: Channel-aware Multimodal Electroencephalography-text Alignment for Generalizable Brain Foundation Models

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2603.13272v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models have shown promise for learning generalizable representations, yet they remain sensitive to channel heterogeneity, such as changes in channel composition or ordering. We propose channel-aware multimodal EEG-text alignment contrastive language image pretraining (CAMEL-CLIP), a contrastive EEG-text multimodal foundation model designed to be robust to heterogeneous channel configurations and widely applicable to diverse downstream tasks. CAMEL-CLIP combines three components: (1) channel attribute-based positional encoding, which identifies channels using their anatomical attributes and reference type; (2) dynamic channel projection, which preserves channel-specific information across varying numbers of EEG channels and combines textual reports with channel information to support channel-wise EEG-text matching; and (3) dual-level contrastive learning, which aligns EEG signals with text at both the individual-channel and whole-sample levels. Experimental results show that CAMEL-CLIP achieves the highest mean balanced accuracy among the evaluated baselines across multiple datasets under linear probing. CAMEL-CLIP also shows high classification performance when transferred between different channel configurations without classifier retraining.
Hanseul Choi, Jinyeong Park, Seongwon Jin, Sungho Park, Jibum Kim

Do Compact SSL Backbones Matter for Audio Deepfake Detection? A Controlled Study with RAPTOR

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2603.06164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) underpins modern audio deepfake detection, yet most prior work centers on a single large wav2vec2-XLSR backbone, leaving compact under studied. We present RAPTOR, Representation Aware Pairwise-gated Transformer for Out-of-domain Recognition a controlled study of compact SSL backbones from the HuBERT and WavLM within a unified pairwise-gated fusion detector, evaluated across 14 cross-domain benchmarks. We show that multilingual HuBERT pre-training is the primary driver of cross-domain robustness, enabling 100M models to match larger and commercial systems. Beyond EER, we introduce a test-time augmentation protocol with perturbation-based aleatoric uncertainty to expose calibration differences invisible to standard metrics: WavLM variants exhibit overconfident miscalibration under perturbation, whereas iterative mHuBERT remains stable. These findings indicate that SSL pre-training trajectory, not model scale, drives reliable audio deepfake detection.
Ajinkya Kulkarni, Sandipana Dowerah, Atharva Kulkarni, Tanel Alum\"ae, Mathew Magimai Doss

Activity Recognition from Smart Insole Sensor Data Using a Circular Dilated CNN

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2603.04477v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smart insoles equipped with pressure sensors, accelerometers, and gyroscopes offer a non-intrusive way of monitoring human gait and posture. We present an activity classification system based on a circular dilated convolutional neural network (CDCNN) that processes multi-modal time-series data from such insoles. The model operates on 160-frame windows with 24 channels (18 pressure, 3 accelerometer, 3 gyroscope axes), achieving 86.42% test accuracy in a subject-independent evaluation on a four-class task (Standing, Walking, Sitting, Tandem). Permutation feature importance reveals the distribution of contributions made by various sensors to the classification process. The proposed approach has potential applications in areas such as smart insole design, health monitoring, and rehabilitation.
Yanhua Zhao

Directional Attention Guidance for Diffusion Models via Sparse Hopfield Retrieval

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2603.02531v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) improves sample quality in diffusion models, but its dual-pass inference and null-condition training limit its use in few-step regimes. Attention-space guidance is a single-pass alternative, yet why sparse-versus-dense attention guidance works remains elusive. We analyze attention extrapolation through Modern Hopfield dynamics and establish two directional properties of the sparse-dense discrepancy under shared conditioning that identify it as an acceleration direction toward the dominant stored pattern. Building on this, we propose Directional Attention Guidance (DAG), a training-free, single-pass rule that amplifies only the component of the discrepancy aligned with the retrieval direction; stability follows from a weak contraction property, and an analysis inside real cross-attention layers shows that this alignment is observed throughout sampling. DAG generalizes across UNet and MMDiT backbones and multi-step and few-step regimes, improving text alignment and human-preference scores on every backbone tested, including FLUX.1, FLUX.2, and Qwen-Image, at a small added cost per image over the base sampler.
Kwanyoung Kim

Flowette: Flow Matching with Graphette Priors for Graph Generation

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2602.23566v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study generative modeling of graphs with recurring subgraph motifs. We propose Flowette, a continuous flow matching framework that employs a graph neural network-based transformer to learn a velocity field over graph representations with node and edge attributes. Our model promotes topology-aware alignment through optimal transport-based coupling and preserves structural fidelity through endpoint-aware and chemistry-aware regularisation. To incorporate domain-driven structural priors, we introduce graphettes, a new probabilistic family of graph structure models that generalize graphons via controlled structural edits for motifs such as rings, stars, and trees. We theoretically analyze the coupling, invariance, and structural properties of the framework, evaluate it on synthetic and molecular benchmarks, and isolate the contributions of the structural prior, the optimal-transport coupling, and the regularisation terms through controlled ablations. Flowette achieves competitive performance overall, attaining state-of-the-art results on several metrics across multiple benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of combining structural priors with flow-based training for modeling complex graph distributions.
Asiri Wijesinghe, Sevvandi Kandanaarachchi, Daniel M. Steinberg, Cheng Soon Ong

RoboGene: Diversity-Driven Agentic Task Generation Framework for VLA Pre-training

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2602.16444v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pursuit of general-purpose robotic manipulation is hindered by the scarcity of diverse, real-world interaction data. Unlike large-scale web vision-language data, robotic data collection incurs prohibitive physical costs. The key challenge is thus not merely to collect more robot data, but to obtain informative training data that broadens behavioral coverage across objects, scenes, and skills. Yet automatically curating task proposals to maximize the utility of collected data remains under-explored. We introduce RoboGene, an agentic framework for generating diverse, informative manipulation tasks across single-arm, dual-arm, and mobile robots. RoboGene combines (1) diversity-driven sampling for broad task coverage, (2) agentic self-reflection for task-quality assessment, and (3) human-verified feedback memory for execution-grounded validation and continual refinement. Through quantitative analysis and large-scale real-world experiments, we collect 18k trajectories and introduce metrics for task feasibility and diversity. RoboGene significantly outperforms frontier foundation models, including GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5 Pro. VLA models trained on RoboGene-generated data achieve higher success rates and stronger generalization, highlighting the value of high-quality task generation. Project page: https://robogene-boost-vla.github.io/. Datasets: Hugging Face (https://huggingface.co/datasets/X-Humanoid/RoboGene) and ModelScope (https://modelscope.cn/datasets/X-Humanoid/RoboGene_tasks).
Yixue Zhang, Kun Wu, Zhi Gao, Zhen Zhao, Pei Ren, Zhiyuan Xu, Fei Liao, Xinhua Wang, Shichao Fan, Di Wu, Qiuxuan Feng, Meng Li, Zhengping Che, Chang Liu, Jian Tang

FlowHOI: Flow-based Semantics-Grounded Generation of Hand-Object Interactions for Dexterous Robot Manipulation

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2602.13444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models can generate plausible end-effector motions, yet they often fail in long-horizon, contact-rich tasks because the underlying hand-object interaction (HOI) structure is not explicitly represented. An embodiment-agnostic interaction representation that captures this structure would make manipulation behaviors easier to validate and transfer across robots. We propose FlowHOI, a two-stage flow-matching framework that generates semantically grounded, temporally coherent HOI sequences, comprising hand poses, object poses, and hand-object contact states, conditioned on an egocentric observation, a language instruction, and a 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) scene reconstruction. We decouple geometry-centric grasping from semantics-centric manipulation, conditioning the latter on compact 3D scene tokens and employing a motion-text alignment loss to semantically ground the generated interactions in both the physical scene layout and the language instruction. To address the scarcity of high-fidelity HOI supervision, we introduce a reconstruction pipeline that recovers aligned hand-object trajectories and meshes from large-scale egocentric videos, yielding an HOI prior for robust generation. Across the GRAB and HOT3D benchmarks, FlowHOI achieves the highest action recognition accuracy and a 1.7$\times$ higher physics simulation success rate than the strongest diffusion-based baseline, while delivering a 40$\times$ inference speedup. We further demonstrate real-robot execution on four dexterous manipulation tasks, illustrating the feasibility of retargeting generated HOI representations to real-robot execution pipelines.
Huajian Zeng, Lingyun Chen, Jiaqi Yang, Yuantai Zhang, Fan Shi, Peidong Liu, Xingxing Zuo

EpiFlow: Bridging Safety and Performance in Offline Reinforcement Learning via Epigraph-Guided Flow Matching

6 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2602.08054v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising framework for deploying autonomous systems in safety-critical settings without the risks of online exploration. However, learning policies that simultaneously achieve high performance and strong safety guarantees from fixed datasets remains a fundamental challenge. Many existing safe offline RL approaches typically rely on soft constraint formulations, which may permit safety violations and are sensitive to distributional shift. In contrast, formal methods such as Hamilton--Jacobi (HJ) reachability and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide rigorous safety guarantees, but often yield overly conservative solutions, often neglecting performance. In this work, we bridge this gap by formulating safe offline RL as a state-constrained optimal control problem, where safety is enforced through hard state constraints and performance is captured via a reward function. The resulting value function satisfies a Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) equation, which we approximate using offline RL on fixed datasets by learning an epigraph feasibility value function and extracting policies via flow matching. This formulation enables principled integration of safety guarantees with data-driven policy optimization. Empirically, across safety-critical benchmarks including boat navigation, Safety-Gymnasium, and Bullet-Safety-Gym tasks, our approach achieves competitive returns while exhibiting near-zero constraint violations, demonstrating a favorable balance between safety and performance in the offline setting.
Manan Tayal, Mumuksh Tayal, Ravi Prakash