SlideChain: Semantic Provenance for Lecture Understanding via Blockchain Registration

Modern vision--language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to interpret and generate educational content, yet their semantic outputs remain challenging to verify, reproduce, and audit over time. Inconsistencies across model families, inference settings, and computing environments undermine the reliability of AI-generated instructional material, particularly in high-stakes and quantitative STEM domains. This work introduces SlideChain, a blockchain-backed provenance framework designed to provide verifiable integrity for multimodal semantic extraction at scale. Using the SlideChain Slides Dataset-a curated corpus of 1,117 medical imaging lecture slides from a university course-we extract concepts and relational triples from four state-of-the-art VLMs and construct structured provenance records for every slide. SlideChain anchors cryptographic hashes of these records on a local EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)-compatible blockchain, providing tamper-evident auditability and persistent semantic baselines. Through the first systematic analysis of semantic disagreement, cross-model similarity, and lecture-level variability in multimodal educational content, we reveal pronounced cross-model discrepancies, including low concept overlap and near-zero agreement in relational triples on many slides. We further evaluate gas usage, throughput, and scalability under simulated deployment conditions, and demonstrate perfect tamper detection along with deterministic reproducibility across independent extraction runs. Together, these results show that SlideChain provides a practical and scalable step toward trustworthy, verifiable multimodal educational pipelines, supporting long-term auditability, reproducibility, and integrity for AI-assisted instructional systems.

ALIVE: An Avatar-Lecture Interactive Video Engine with Content-Aware Retrieval for Real-Time Interaction

Traditional lecture videos offer flexibility but lack mechanisms for real-time clarification, forcing learners to search externally when confusion arises. Recent advances in large language models and neural avatars provide new opportunities for interactive learning, yet existing systems typically lack lecture awareness, rely on cloud-based services, or fail to integrate retrieval and avatar-delivered explanations in a unified, privacy-preserving pipeline. We present ALIVE, an Avatar-Lecture Interactive Video Engine that transforms passive lecture viewing into a dynamic, real-time learning experience. ALIVE operates fully on local hardware and integrates (1) Avatar-delivered lecture generated through ASR transcription, LLM refinement, and neural talking-head synthesis; (2) A content-aware retrieval mechanism that combines semantic similarity with timestamp alignment to surface contextually relevant lecture segments; and (3) Real-time multimodal interaction, enabling students to pause the lecture, ask questions through text or voice, and receive grounded explanations either as text or as avatar-delivered responses. To maintain responsiveness, ALIVE employs lightweight embedding models, FAISS-based retrieval, and segmented avatar synthesis with progressive preloading. We demonstrate the system on a complete medical imaging course, evaluate its retrieval accuracy, latency characteristics, and user experience, and show that ALIVE provides accurate, content-aware, and engaging real-time support. ALIVE illustrates how multimodal AI-when combined with content-aware retrieval and local deployment-can significantly enhance the pedagogical value of recorded lectures, offering an extensible pathway toward next-generation interactive learning environments.

3One2: One-step Regression Plus One-step Diffusion for One-hot Modulation in Dual-path Video Snapshot Compressive Imaging

Video snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) captures dynamic scene sequences through a two-dimensional (2D) snapshot, fundamentally relying on optical modulation for hardware compression and the corresponding software reconstruction. While mainstream video SCI using random binary modulation has demonstrated success, it inevitably results in temporal aliasing during compression. One-hot modulation, activating only one sub-frame per pixel, provides a promising solution for achieving perfect temporal decoupling, thereby alleviating issues associated with aliasing. However, no algorithms currently exist to fully exploit this potential. To bridge this gap, we propose an algorithm specifically designed for one-hot masks. First, leveraging the decoupling properties of one-hot modulation, we transform the reconstruction task into a generative video inpainting problem and introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE) of the forward process that aligns with the hardware compression process. Next, we identify limitations of the pure diffusion method for video SCI and propose a novel framework that combines one-step regression initialization with one-step diffusion refinement. Furthermore, to mitigate the spatial degradation caused by one-hot modulation, we implement a dual optical path at the hardware level, utilizing complementary information from another path to enhance the inpainted video. To our knowledge, this is the first work integrating diffusion into video SCI reconstruction. Experiments conducted on synthetic datasets and real scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

X-WIN: Building Chest Radiograph World Model via Predictive Sensing

Chest X-ray radiography (CXR) is an essential medical imaging technique for disease diagnosis. However, as 2D projectional images, CXRs are limited by structural superposition and hence fail to capture 3D anatomies. This limitation makes representation learning and disease diagnosis challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel CXR world model named X-WIN, which distills volumetric knowledge from chest computed tomography (CT) by learning to predict its 2D projections in latent space. The core idea is that a world model with internalized knowledge of 3D anatomical structure can predict CXRs under various transformations in 3D space. During projection prediction, we introduce an affinity-guided contrastive alignment loss that leverages mutual similarities to capture rich, correlated information across projections from the same volume. To improve model adaptability, we incorporate real CXRs into training through masked image modeling and employ a domain classifier to encourage statistically similar representations for real and simulated CXRs. Comprehensive experiments show that X-WIN outperforms existing foundation models on diverse downstream tasks using linear probing and few-shot fine-tuning. X-WIN also demonstrates the ability to render 2D projections for reconstructing a 3D CT volume.

N-ReLU: Zero-Mean Stochastic Extension of ReLU

Activation functions are fundamental for enabling nonlinear representations in deep neural networks. However, the standard rectified linear unit (ReLU) often suffers from inactive or "dead" neurons caused by its hard zero cutoff. To address this issue, we introduce N-ReLU (Noise-ReLU), a zero-mean stochastic extension of ReLU that replaces negative activations with Gaussian noise while preserving the same expected output. This expectation-aligned formulation maintains gradient flow in inactive regions and acts as an annealing-style regularizer during training. Experiments on the MNIST dataset using both multilayer perceptron (MLP) and convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures show that N-ReLU achieves accuracy comparable to or slightly exceeding that of ReLU, LeakyReLU, PReLU, GELU, and RReLU at moderate noise levels (sigma = 0.05-0.10), with stable convergence and no dead neurons observed. These results demonstrate that lightweight Gaussian noise injection offers a simple yet effective mechanism to enhance optimization robustness without modifying network structures or introducing additional parameters.

Median2Median: Zero-shot Suppression of Structured Noise in Images

Image denoising is a fundamental problem in computer vision and medical imaging. However, real-world images are often degraded by structured noise with strong anisotropic correlations that existing methods struggle to remove. Most data-driven approaches rely on large datasets with high-quality labels and still suffer from limited generalizability, whereas existing zero-shot methods avoid this limitation but remain effective only for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) noise. To address this gap, we propose Median2Median (M2M), a zero-shot denoising framework designed for structured noise. M2M introduces a novel sampling strategy that generates pseudo-independent sub-image pairs from a single noisy input. This strategy leverages directional interpolation and generalized median filtering to adaptively exclude values distorted by structured artifacts. To further enlarge the effective sampling space and eliminate systematic bias, a randomized assignment strategy is employed, ensuring that the sampled sub-image pairs are suitable for Noise2Noise training. In our realistic simulation studies, M2M performs on par with state-of-the-art zero-shot methods under i.i.d. noise, while consistently outperforming them under correlated noise. These findings establish M2M as an efficient, data-free solution for structured noise suppression and mark the first step toward effective zero-shot denoising beyond the strict i.i.d. assumption.

What Matters in LLM-Based Feature Extractor for Recommender? A Systematic Analysis of Prompts, Models, and Adaptation

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate semantic features has been demonstrated as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS). This typically involves three stages: processing item text, extracting features with LLMs, and adapting them for downstream models. However, existing methods vary widely in prompting, architecture, and adaptation strategies, making it difficult to fairly compare design choices and identify what truly drives performance. In this work, we propose RecXplore, a modular analytical framework that decomposes the LLM-as-feature-extractor pipeline into four modules: data processing, semantic feature extraction, feature adaptation, and sequential modeling. Instead of proposing new techniques, RecXplore revisits and organizes established methods, enabling systematic exploration of each module in isolation. Experiments on four public datasets show that simply combining the best designs from existing techniques without exhaustive search yields up to 18.7% relative improvement in NDCG@5 and 12.7% in HR@5 over strong baselines. These results underscore the utility of modular benchmarking for identifying effective design patterns and promoting standardized research in LLM-enhanced recommendation.

LAMA-Net: A Convergent Network Architecture for Dual-Domain Reconstruction

We propose a learnable variational model that learns the features and leverages complementary information from both image and measurement domains for image reconstruction. In particular, we introduce a learned alternating minimization algorithm (LAMA) from our prior work, which tackles two-block nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by incorporating a residual learning architecture in a proximal alternating framework. In this work, our goal is to provide a complete and rigorous convergence proof of LAMA and show that all accumulation points of a specified subsequence of LAMA must be Clarke stationary points of the problem. LAMA directly yields a highly interpretable neural network architecture called LAMA-Net. Notably, in addition to the results shown in our prior work, we demonstrate that the convergence property of LAMA yields outstanding stability and robustness of LAMA-Net in this work. We also show that the performance of LAMA-Net can be further improved by integrating a properly designed network that generates suitable initials, which we call iLAMA-Net. To evaluate LAMA-Net/iLAMA-Net, we conduct several experiments and compare them with several state-of-the-art methods on popular benchmark datasets for Sparse-View Computed Tomography.

LangMamba: A Language-driven Mamba Framework for Low-dose CT Denoising with Vision-language Models

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) reduces radiation exposure but often degrades image quality, potentially compromising diagnostic accuracy. Existing deep learning-based denoising methods focus primarily on pixel-level mappings, overlooking the potential benefits of high-level semantic guidance. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) suggest that language can serve as a powerful tool for capturing structured semantic information, offering new opportunities to improve LDCT reconstruction. In this paper, we introduce LangMamba, a Language-driven Mamba framework for LDCT denoising that leverages VLM-derived representations to enhance supervision from normal-dose CT (NDCT). LangMamba follows a two-stage learning strategy. First, we pre-train a Language-guided AutoEncoder (LangAE) that leverages frozen VLMs to map NDCT images into a semantic space enriched with anatomical information. Second, we synergize LangAE with two key components to guide LDCT denoising: Semantic-Enhanced Efficient Denoiser (SEED), which enhances NDCT-relevant local semantic while capturing global features with efficient Mamba mechanism, and Language-engaged Dual-space Alignment (LangDA) Loss, which ensures that denoised images align with NDCT in both perceptual and semantic spaces. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that LangMamba outperforms conventional state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving detail preservation and visual fidelity. Remarkably, LangAE exhibits strong generalizability to unseen datasets, thereby reducing training costs. Furthermore, LangDA loss improves explainability by integrating language-guided insights into image reconstruction and offers a plug-and-play fashion. Our findings shed new light on the potential of language as a supervisory signal to advance LDCT denoising. The code is publicly available on https://github.com/hao1635/LangMamba.

Consistent Video Editing as Flow-Driven Image-to-Video Generation

With the prosper of video diffusion models, down-stream applications like video editing have been significantly promoted without consuming much computational cost. One particular challenge in this task lies at the motion transfer process from the source video to the edited one, where it requires the consideration of the shape deformation in between, meanwhile maintaining the temporal consistency in the generated video sequence. However, existing methods fail to model complicated motion patterns for video editing, and are fundamentally limited to object replacement, where tasks with non-rigid object motions like multi-object and portrait editing are largely neglected. In this paper, we observe that optical flows offer a promising alternative in complex motion modeling, and present FlowV2V to re-investigate video editing as a task of flow-driven Image-to-Video (I2V) generation. Specifically, FlowV2V decomposes the entire pipeline into first-frame editing and conditional I2V generation, and simulates pseudo flow sequence that aligns with the deformed shape, thus ensuring the consistency during editing. Experimental results on DAVIS-EDIT with improvements of 13.67% and 50.66% on DOVER and warping error illustrate the superior temporal consistency and sample quality of FlowV2V compared to existing state-of-the-art ones. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to analyze the internal functionalities of the first-frame paradigm and flow alignment in the proposed method.