Background and Objective: Quality control is a prerequisite for whole-slide image analysis, yet the benchmarks on which quality-control methods are compared share four properties that make their reported differences hard to interpret: few independent slides, annotation concentrated in a minority of them, pooled ratio metrics with no closed-form standard error, and a single inherited train/test partition. We propose a reliability protocol for such benchmarks. Methods: The protocol quantifies four sources of variability - test-set sampling, training stochasticity, partition composition, and undocumented preprocessing - a claim is reportable only if it survives all four; three of the four cost minutes of compute. We apply it to an independent reconstruction of a published diffusion-based artifact detector, evaluated on the original 24-slide partition and against a supervised baseline. Results: The method's central mechanism reproduces: the auxiliary contrastive term improves pooled F1 from 0.673 to 0.688 and replicates under a second seed (+0.0156, p = 0.031; +0.0190, p = 0.005), although it acts on pen marking rather than the artifact types cited to motivate it. Its comparative claims do not: differences between design variants, and against the supervised baseline, fall inside the uncertainty of the evaluation. Four of 24 slides carry 70% of scored annotated pixels, giving an effective sample size of 6.2, and the inherited partition sits at the 7th percentile. An unreported tissue-restriction step excludes 41.4% of out-of-focus annotation against 2.6% of air bubble; such a gate is confounded with blur by construction. Conclusions: Small-cohort benchmarks support far weaker conclusions than current reporting implies. The four checks are cheap enough to accompany any evaluation on such a resource and separate reproducible effects from differences the evaluation cannot resolve.
Composable scene modeling aims to recover a real indoor scene as complete, editable object assets arranged as observed, giving robot simulation and embodied AI a simulation-ready replica of the real environment whose objects can be manipulated individually. Existing pipelines decompose the task into three steps---parse the observations into instances, generate an asset for each, and place each asset back---but every step presumes an input that a cluttered capture rarely provides: accurate instance geometry, unoccluded views, and assets that accurately match the observations. We propose Lucida, which keeps this order but redistributes the requirements, so each step consumes only what a real capture reliably provides and precision is reached at the end of the pipeline rather than demanded at its start. Lucida parses the video into a scene graph whose nodes carry per-instance multi-view evidence, generates a complete asset for each instance from its evidence, and places assets with GizmoAct, a VLM policy that casts placement as multi-turn GUI interaction, manipulating the object's gizmo in a closed loop and deciding itself when alignment is reached. Across scene-level 3D object detection, object pose estimation, and scene reconstruction, Lucida improves mAP over Boxer by 69% on R2S-Scene, raises ADD-SB@0.05 from 57.8% to 83.4% on CA-1M, and increases scene F-Score from 0.794 for SAM3D to 0.924.
Minghan Qin, Yuang Wang, Xiuyu Yang et al.· 0 citations
Geospatial foundation models have emerged as state-of-the-art methods for downstream Earth observation tasks. However, existing pretraining methodologies process imagery through a single-concept lens, failing to capture the highly compositional nature of complex satellite scenes. We propose a composition-aware pretraining framework that explicitly encodes fractional land-cover mixtures. Each satellite image cell is mapped to a histogram representing its fractional land-cover distribution, which we term the "composition target". These targets serve as the primary prediction objective and are distilled into the backbone using Earth Mover's Distance. Experimental evaluation shows that composition-aware pretraining yields substantial gains on region-level understanding tasks requiring semantic similarity judgment, including zero-shot image retrieval and scene classification, while remaining competitive on tasks requiring fine-grained spatial precision, such as segmentation and object detection. With a 36.8M-parameter backbone, our framework outperforms SatMAE and Prithvi-EO-2.0, which contain 303M and 600M parameters, respectively, in most retrieval and scene classification settings. On the fine-grained ForestNet-12 dataset, a rigorous testbed for compositional discrimination, our method boosts baseline mAP@10 from 0.279 to 0.434, a 55.6% relative improvement, providing direct evidence for the effectiveness of explicit composition modeling. The code implementation can be found at https://github.com/05kashyap/GFM_Composition_Pretraining
Natural-language tasks can elicit different verdicts from protocol-following evaluators that receive the same declared information. We study aggregate disambiguation systems (ADSs). Given a task and a candidate solution, each evaluator casts a binary vote on whether the solution should be accepted, and the system aggregates the votes of a finite panel. The target is protocol reproducibility relative to an explicitly declared evaluator reference, not semantic truth. We separate fixed finite censuses, probabilistic evaluator populations, and growing-census limits, since their endpoint laws and guarantees are not interchangeable. In the population setting, we use finite samples to estimate how often a finite panel reaches the same decision as the declared evaluator population. We provide a lower confidence bound on the fraction of candidate solutions for which the disagreement probability is at most a chosen tolerance. The calculation accounts separately for sampling candidate solutions and sampling evaluators. The construction permits arbitrary dependence among columns induced by shared evaluator rows and uses exact binomial intervals at the evaluator layer and an exact one-sided binomial inversion at the generator layer. Simulations check the implementation against known population coverages and expose power limitations.
Jos\'e Mar\'ia Lago, Albert Castellana, Edgars Nem\v{s}e· 0 citations
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Large language models (LLMs) have become an essential tool for assisting developers, yet we still lack knowledge on ways to effectively support their interactions during development activities. That is, the quality of interactions with a chat-based LLM still strongly depends on how developers phrase prompts and which information they include. Our goal is to evaluate whether interventions into these interactions with LLMs have an effect on software developers---be it harmful or beneficial. To this end, we conducted a four-month longitudinal study with third-semester computer science students working on a full-stack Web development project using chat-based LLMs under three conditions: (1) a \emph{context}-aware group received intent-based conversation augmentation, (2) a \emph{proactive} group received follow-up suggestions and tailored advice, and (3) a \emph{control} group without intervention. Our augmentations are minimal: (i) to reduce confounding factors and (ii) to isolate treatment effects. Analyzing interaction logs and user surveys revealed no major differences in interaction patterns, indicating no detectable harmful effects in the measured outcomes when intervening in interactions. Moreover, we observed trends of increased satisfaction with the \emph{proactive} treatment. The results indicate that even with minimal interventions, dynamic guidance mechanisms for developer-LLM interactions show observable effects, such that more severe augmentations may have the potential to substantially improve developer satisfaction.
Annemarie Wittig, Alina Mailach, Janet Siegmund et al.· 0 citations
In large-scale e-commerce retrieval, dual-encoder retrievers are op- timized for contrastive similarity, whereas downstream rerankers capture finer-grained relevance preferences; this objective mis- match limits end-to-end retrieval quality. Reinforcement Learning offers a way to use reward-model feedback for retriever adaptation, but we observe that standard policy-gradient updates can degrade embedding geometry, especially when the document index must remain frozen due to industrial constraints. To address this, we propose PAO (Positive-Advantage-Only), a selective RL optimization method. Our analysis reveals that in- discriminate penalization of negative samples (pushing away) in a frozen high-dimensional space disrupts pre-trained semantic man- ifolds. PAO selectively applies gradient updates only to retrieved items with positive advantages, effectively pulling query embed- dings toward high-reward regions while preserving global topo- logical stability. Experiments on both a massive industrial dataset and public benchmarks demonstrate that PAO significantly outper- forms standard RL and distillation baselines.
Shaowei Wei, Chong Huang, Songtao Fang et al.· 0 citations
Small-object detection under long-tailed data distributions is a fundamental yet challenging problem in multimedia. Railway Foreign Object Detection (RFOD) epitomizes this challenge with easily confused small intrusions and scarce samples. To address these issues, we propose a generative-augmented detection paradigm that leverages multimodal image generation to enrich the feature space of rare and small objects. We first construct RailGen, a multimodal image generation agent based on large models. Under semantic constraints, RailGen automatically invokes tools to generate railway scenes, calibrate intrusion positions, extract foreign objects, and fuse them into realistic intrusion effects. This process produces high-quality synthetic samples that effectively densify the feature representations of tail classes and complete the small-object feature space. Within this paradigm, we further propose FocalDEIM, a detection framework designed to enhance training with generated data. FocalDEIM improves dense matching with Focal Modulation for better small-object discrimination and adopts Focal Loss to emphasize hard samples, thereby alleviating blurred inter-class boundaries in complex railway scenes. Experimental results demonstrate that RailGen can generate high-quality small-scale foreign objects, reducing the object pixel area by up to 58x and 13.85x on average. Equipped with these challenging samples, our paradigm surpasses the baseline DEIM by 5.6% and 7.5% in mAP@50 and mAP@(50-95), respectively, and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies verify RailGen's feature-space enrichment and FocalDEIM's boundary discrimination. The paradigm provides an effective multimodal generative solution for long-tailed small-object detection in safety-critical applications.
Quan Hao, Ziyang Tao, Chenxi Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Railway foreign object detection (RFOD) is critical to safe railway operation, yet scarce real positive samples incompletely represent task-relevant variations in object scale, intrusion relation, railway scene, illumination, and adverse weather. Existing synthetic augmentation can improve RFOD detection, but its gains lack an explicit account of the task-relevant deficiencies complemented by the generated data. We therefore introduce RailSyn, a diagnosis-guided framework comprising a real-referenced Inspector and a requirement-aligned Generator. The Inspector constructs a variable-radius empirical cover from finite real observations to localize candidate completion regions and profile synthetic pools. The resulting audit identifies railway-context, intrusion-semantic, and visual-consistency requirements; the Generator addresses them through domain adaptation, agent-planned placement and physical contact relations, and plan-consistent conditional refinement. Using the Inspector, we further trace representation-space changes across generation variants; the complete system attains a local-shell occupation of $C_{gap}$ to 13.64%, which measures generated coverage of real-derived completion regions. Extensive experiments show AP50--95 gains of up to 4.9 points and consistent improvements across nine mainstream detectors, demonstrating broad cross-architecture utility.
Quan Hao, Chenxi Zhang, Ziyang Tao et al.· 0 citations
Collecting natural-language referring expressions along with region annotations, such as masks or boxes, is a major bottleneck in visual grounding (VG), as annotators must write descriptions that distinguish target regions from visually similar ones. We tackle this by formulating active learning (AL) for VG under the realistic setting where only raw images are available without accompanying text. Since ground-truth text is unavailable, sample selection must estimate which images contain ambiguous regions that would require discriminative referring expressions. To address this, we generate auxiliary region-text pairs using foundation models, and introduce Referred Region Ambiguity, a new acquisition function that measures whether the model's confidence collapses onto a single region or disperses across multiple candidates. It allows our method to prioritize images with strong cross-region competition, which are more informative due to their visual ambiguity. We also design a referring-expression annotation interface that helps annotators quickly focus on writing discriminative language with a few clicks. Experiments on RIS and REC benchmarks show that our AL framework consistently outperforms several AL baselines, while a user study shows up to 1.6X faster description labeling of ours.
Junbeom Hong, Seonghoon Yu, Hyungsik Jung et al.· 0 citations
With the development of large language models (LLMs), generative retrieval is becoming increasingly important in e-commerce scenarios. Current mainstream approaches typically use a two-stage training strategy: first train a product embedding model, and then learn a codebook that maps embeddings to product IDs. This cascaded approach suffers from two major issues: (1) error accumulation-if the embedding model in the first stage produces biased representations, the codebook in the second stage cannot correct these errors, degrading final retrieval performance; and (2) codebook learning relies solely on product embeddings and lacks modeling of query-to-product and product-to-product interactions. As a result, products belonging to the same cluster may be assigned inconsistent IDs by the codebook, further hurting retrieval accuracy. To address these problems, we propose a novel method that jointly trains the embedding model and the codebook, and incorporates same product cluster information as an additional supervision signal. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves e-commerce retrieval performance while simultaneously enhancing both embedding and codebook learning.
Songtao Fang, Zihao Xu, Shaowei Wei et al.· 0 citations
Robust estimation is a core computer vision task frequently tackled using sample consensus. However, traditional methods suffer from inefficient sampling as they struggle to identify effective minimum sets before hypothesis evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Diffusion-guided Sampling for Consensus-based Robust Estimation (DiffSAC) framework. DiffSAC introduces a diffusion model to learn the distribution of effective minimum sets. It refines the confidence for each data point, indicating whether it belongs to a good minimum set, rather than ranking the data points as in previous work. This significantly reduces the need to process numerous bad sets. To constrain the refinement direction, geometric features are incorporated as conditions within our diffusion model. Consequently, DiffSAC outputs a small number of high-quality minimum sets, enabling identification of the best hypothesis via consensus evaluation. Notably, compared to previous works requiring evaluating over ten thousand hypotheses, DiffSAC achieves state-of-the-art performance with only dozens, significantly boosting efficiency. Extensive experiments across five classic computer vision tasks demonstrate the superiority of DiffSAC. The diffusion model's sampling accelerators enable real-time operation, and DiffSAC can be used as a plug-and-play module to improve existing sample consensus methods.
Chang Nie, Guangming Wang, Zhe Liu et al.· 0 citations
Generative Retrieval (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm by mapping queries directly to Semantic IDs (SIDs) with powerful representation capabilities for candidate items. However, existing SIDs derived solely from item content create a semantic gap, failing to align dynamic query intents with static item representations. Furthermore, current generative paradigms rarely model user behavior sequences and are always bottlenecked by the high inference latency of beam-search autoregressive decoding. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{C}$ross-component $\textbf{H}$ierarchical semantic $\textbf{A}$lignment for $\textbf{P}$ersonalized generative retrieval ($\textbf{CHAP}$), a novel personalized GR framework from a hierarchical perspective. First, we design a Hierarchical Semantic Alignment module to align query's latent space with item's quantization path and synchronize multi-granular semantics. Second, we construct a personalized GR framework that models user behavior by synergizing discrete SIDs for structural guidance and continuous representations for fine-grained semantic refinement. Notably, we introduce a Residual Cascading Generation mechanism to restrict the costly multi-step Transformer Decoder to a single-pass inference, boosting inference throughput while mitigating information loss. Extensive experiments on three public datasets, one proprietary industrial dataset, and online A/B tests demonstrate CHAP's superiority, validating the effectiveness and practical value of our approach. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zzzgm/CHAP.
Gao-Ming Zhang, Ang-Qing Jiang, Jian-Chun Song et al.· 0 citations
