Boosting Micro-Expression Analysis via Prior-Guided Video-Level Regression

Micro-expressions (MEs) are involuntary, low-intensity, and short-duration facial expressions that often reveal an individual's genuine thoughts and emotions. Most existing ME analysis methods rely on window-level classification with fixed window sizes and hard decisions, which limits their ability to capture the complex temporal dynamics of MEs. Although recent approaches have adopted video-level regression frameworks to address some of these challenges, interval decoding still depends on manually predefined, window-based methods, leaving the issue only partially mitigated. In this paper, we propose a prior-guided video-level regression method for ME analysis. We introduce a scalable interval selection strategy that comprehensively considers the temporal evolution, duration, and class distribution characteristics of MEs, enabling precise spotting of the onset, apex, and offset phases. In addition, we introduce a synergistic optimization framework, in which the spotting and recognition tasks share parameters except for the classification heads. This fully exploits complementary information, makes more efficient use of limited data, and enhances the model's capability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method, with an STRS of 0.0562 on CAS(ME)$^3$ and 0.2000 on SAMMLV. The code is available at https://github.com/zizheng-guo/BoostingVRME.

ME-TST+: Micro-expression Analysis via Temporal State Transition with ROI Relationship Awareness

Micro-expressions (MEs) are regarded as important indicators of an individual's intrinsic emotions, preferences, and tendencies. ME analysis requires spotting of ME intervals within long video sequences and recognition of their corresponding emotional categories. Previous deep learning approaches commonly employ sliding-window classification networks. However, the use of fixed window lengths and hard classification presents notable limitations in practice. Furthermore, these methods typically treat ME spotting and recognition as two separate tasks, overlooking the essential relationship between them. To address these challenges, this paper proposes two state space model-based architectures, namely ME-TST and ME-TST+, which utilize temporal state transition mechanisms to replace conventional window-level classification with video-level regression. This enables a more precise characterization of the temporal dynamics of MEs and supports the modeling of MEs with varying durations. In ME-TST+, we further introduce multi-granularity ROI modeling and the slowfast Mamba framework to alleviate information loss associated with treating ME analysis as a time-series task. Additionally, we propose a synergy strategy for spotting and recognition at both the feature and result levels, leveraging their intrinsic connection to enhance overall analysis performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance. The codes are available at https://github.com/zizheng-guo/ME-TST.

From Black Boxes to Transparent Minds: Evaluating and Enhancing the Theory of Mind in Multimodal Large Language Models

As large language models evolve, there is growing anticipation that they will emulate human-like Theory of Mind (ToM) to assist with routine tasks. However, existing methods for evaluating machine ToM focus primarily on unimodal models and largely treat these models as black boxes, lacking an interpretative exploration of their internal mechanisms. In response, this study adopts an approach based on internal mechanisms to provide an interpretability-driven assessment of ToM in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, we first construct a multimodal ToM test dataset, GridToM, which incorporates diverse belief testing tasks and perceptual information from multiple perspectives. Next, our analysis shows that attention heads in multimodal large models can distinguish cognitive information across perspectives, providing evidence of ToM capabilities. Furthermore, we present a lightweight, training-free approach that significantly enhances the model's exhibited ToM by adjusting in the direction of the attention head.

DeCoDe: Defer-and-Complement Decision-Making via Decoupled Concept Bottleneck Models

In human-AI collaboration, a central challenge is deciding whether the AI should handle a task, be deferred to a human expert, or be addressed through collaborative effort. Existing Learning to Defer approaches typically make binary choices between AI and humans, neglecting their complementary strengths. They also lack interpretability, a critical property in high-stakes scenarios where users must understand and, if necessary, correct the model's reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we propose Defer-and-Complement Decision-Making via Decoupled Concept Bottleneck Models (DeCoDe), a concept-driven framework for human-AI collaboration. DeCoDe makes strategy decisions based on human-interpretable concept representations, enhancing transparency throughout the decision process. It supports three flexible modes: autonomous AI prediction, deferral to humans, and human-AI collaborative complementarity, selected via a gating network that takes concept-level inputs and is trained using a novel surrogate loss that balances accuracy and human effort. This approach enables instance-specific, interpretable, and adaptive human-AI collaboration. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DeCoDe significantly outperforms AI-only, human-only, and traditional deferral baselines, while maintaining strong robustness and interpretability even under noisy expert annotations.

Efficient Knowledge Transfer in Multi-Task Learning through Task-Adaptive Low-Rank Representation

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) demonstrate remarkable intelligence but struggle with emerging tasks unseen during training in real-world applications. Training separate models for each new task is usually impractical. Multi-task learning (MTL) addresses this challenge by transferring shared knowledge from source tasks to target tasks. As an dominant parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, prompt tuning (PT) enhances MTL by introducing an adaptable vector that captures task-specific knowledge, which acts as a prefix to the original prompt that preserves shared knowledge, while keeping PLM parameters frozen. However, PT struggles to effectively capture the heterogeneity of task-specific knowledge due to its limited representational capacity. To address this challenge, we propose Task-Adaptive Low-Rank Representation (TA-LoRA), an MTL method built on PT, employing the low-rank representation to model task heterogeneity and a fast-slow weights mechanism where the slow weight encodes shared knowledge, while the fast weight captures task-specific nuances, avoiding the mixing of shared and task-specific knowledge, caused by training low-rank representations from scratch. Moreover, a zero-initialized attention mechanism is introduced to minimize the disruption of immature low-rank components on original prompts during warm-up epochs. Experiments on 16 tasks demonstrate that TA-LoRA achieves state-of-the-art performance in full-data and few-shot settings while maintaining superior parameter efficiency.

Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Multi-Path Collaborative Reactive and Reflection agents

Agents have demonstrated their potential in scientific reasoning tasks through large language models. However, they often face challenges such as insufficient accuracy and degeneration of thought when handling complex reasoning tasks, which impede their performance. To overcome these issues, we propose the Reactive and Reflection agents with Multi-Path Reasoning (RR-MP) Framework, aimed at enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Our approach improves scientific reasoning accuracy by employing a multi-path reasoning mechanism where each path consists of a reactive agent and a reflection agent that collaborate to prevent degeneration of thought inherent in single-agent reliance. Additionally, the RR-MP framework does not require additional training; it utilizes multiple dialogue instances for each reasoning path and a separate summarizer to consolidate insights from all paths. This design integrates diverse perspectives and strengthens reasoning across each path. We conducted zero-shot and few-shot evaluations on tasks involving moral scenarios, college-level physics, and mathematics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches, highlighting the effectiveness and advantages of the RR-MP framework in managing complex scientific reasoning tasks.

A2RNet: Adversarial Attack Resilient Network for Robust Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is a crucial technique for enhancing visual performance by integrating unique information from different modalities into one fused image. Exiting methods pay more attention to conducting fusion with undisturbed data, while overlooking the impact of deliberate interference on the effectiveness of fusion results. To investigate the robustness of fusion models, in this paper, we propose a novel adversarial attack resilient network, called $\textrm{A}^{\textrm{2}}$RNet. Specifically, we develop an adversarial paradigm with an anti-attack loss function to implement adversarial attacks and training. It is constructed based on the intrinsic nature of IVIF and provide a robust foundation for future research advancements. We adopt a Unet as the pipeline with a transformer-based defensive refinement module (DRM) under this paradigm, which guarantees fused image quality in a robust coarse-to-fine manner. Compared to previous works, our method mitigates the adverse effects of adversarial perturbations, consistently maintaining high-fidelity fusion results. Furthermore, the performance of downstream tasks can also be well maintained under adversarial attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/lok-18/A2RNet.

$\textrm{A}^{\textrm{2}}$RNet: Adversarial Attack Resilient Network for Robust Infrared and Visible Image Fusion

Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is a crucial technique for enhancing visual performance by integrating unique information from different modalities into one fused image. Exiting methods pay more attention to conducting fusion with undisturbed data, while overlooking the impact of deliberate interference on the effectiveness of fusion results. To investigate the robustness of fusion models, in this paper, we propose a novel adversarial attack resilient network, called $\textrm{A}^{\textrm{2}}$RNet. Specifically, we develop an adversarial paradigm with an anti-attack loss function to implement adversarial attacks and training. It is constructed based on the intrinsic nature of IVIF and provide a robust foundation for future research advancements. We adopt a Unet as the pipeline with a transformer-based defensive refinement module (DRM) under this paradigm, which guarantees fused image quality in a robust coarse-to-fine manner. Compared to previous works, our method mitigates the adverse effects of adversarial perturbations, consistently maintaining high-fidelity fusion results. Furthermore, the performance of downstream tasks can also be well maintained under adversarial attacks. Code is available at https://github.com/lok-18/A2RNet.

CreDes: Causal Reasoning Enhancement and Dual-End Searching for Solving Long-Range Reasoning Problems using LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated limitations in handling combinatorial optimization problems involving long-range reasoning, partially due to causal hallucinations and huge search space. As for causal hallucinations, i.e., the inconsistency between reasoning and corresponding state transition, this paper introduces the Causal Relationship Enhancement (CRE) mechanism combining cause-effect interventions and the Individual Treatment Effect (ITE) to guarantee the solid causal rightness between each step of reasoning and state transition. As for the long causal range and huge search space limiting the performances of existing models featuring single-direction search, a Dual-End Searching (DES) approach is proposed to seek solutions by simultaneously starting from both the initial and goal states on the causal probability tree. By integrating CRE and DES (CreDes), our model has realized simultaneous multi-step reasoning, circumventing the inefficiencies from cascading multiple one-step reasoning like the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Experiments demonstrate that CreDes significantly outperforms existing State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) solutions in long-range reasoning tasks in terms of both accuracy and time efficiency.

Exploring Information-Theoretic Metrics Associated with Neural Collapse in Supervised Training

In this paper, we utilize information-theoretic metrics like matrix entropy and mutual information to analyze supervised learning. We explore the information content of data representations and classification head weights and their information interplay during supervised training. Experiments show that matrix entropy cannot solely describe the interaction of the information content of data representation and classification head weights but it can effectively reflect the similarity and clustering behavior of the data. Inspired by this, we propose a cross-modal alignment loss to improve the alignment between the representations of the same class from different modalities. Moreover, in order to assess the interaction of the information content of data representation and classification head weights more accurately, we utilize new metrics like matrix mutual information ratio (MIR) and matrix information entropy difference ratio (HDR). Through theory and experiment, we show that HDR and MIR can not only effectively describe the information interplay of supervised training but also improve the performance of supervised and semi-supervised learning.