ICTPolarReal: A Polarized Reflection and Material Dataset of Real World Objects

Accurately modeling how real-world materials reflect light remains a core challenge in inverse rendering, largely due to the scarcity of real measured reflectance data. Existing approaches rely heavily on synthetic datasets with simplified illumination and limited material realism, preventing models from generalizing to real-world images. We introduce a large-scale polarized reflection and material dataset of real-world objects, captured with an 8-camera, 346-light Light Stage equipped with cross/parallel polarization. Our dataset spans 218 everyday objects across five acquisition dimensions-multiview, multi-illumination, polarization, reflectance separation, and material attributes-yielding over 1.2M high-resolution images with diffuse-specular separation and analytically derived diffuse albedo, specular albedo, and surface normals. Using this dataset, we train and evaluate state-of-the-art inverse and forward rendering models on intrinsic decomposition, relighting, and sparse-view 3D reconstruction, demonstrating significant improvements in material separation, illumination fidelity, and geometric consistency. We hope that our work can establish a new foundation for physically grounded material understanding and enable real-world generalization beyond synthetic training regimes. Project page: https://jingyangcarl.github.io/ICTPolarReal/

Multiperspectivity as a Resource for Narrative Similarity Prediction

Predicting narrative similarity can be understood as an inherently interpretive task: different, equally valid readings of the same text can produce divergent interpretations and thus different similarity judgments, posing a fundamental challenge for semantic evaluation benchmarks that encode a single ground truth. Rather than treating this multiperspectivity as a challenge to overcome, we propose to incorporate it in the decision making process of predictive systems. To explore this strategy, we created an ensemble of 31 LLM personas. These range from practitioners following interpretive frameworks to more intuitive, lay-style characters. Our experiments were conducted on the SemEval-2026 Task 4 dataset, where the system achieved an accuracy score of 0.705. Accuracy improves with ensemble size, consistent with Condorcet Jury Theorem-like dynamics under weakened independence. Practitioner personas perform worse individually but produce less correlated errors, yielding larger ensemble gains under majority voting. Our error analysis reveals a consistent negative association between gender-focused interpretive vocabulary and accuracy across all persona categories, suggesting either attention to dimensions not relevant for the benchmark or valid interpretations absent from the ground truth. This finding underscores the need for evaluation frameworks that account for interpretive plurality.

Text-Phase Synergy Network with Dual Priors for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval

This paper studies unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval (UCDIR), which aims to retrieve images of the same category across different domains without relying on labeled data. Existing methods typically utilize pseudo-labels, derived from clustering algorithms, as supervisory signals for intra-domain representation learning and cross-domain feature alignment. However, these discrete pseudo-labels often fail to provide accurate and comprehensive semantic guidance. Moreover, the alignment process frequently overlooks the entanglement between domain-specific and semantic information, leading to semantic degradation in the learned representations and ultimately impairing retrieval performance. This paper addresses the limitations by proposing a Text-Phase Synergy Network with Dual Priors(TPSNet). Specifically, we first employ CLIP to generate a set of class-specific prompts per domain, termed as domain prompt, serving as a text prior that offers more precise semantic supervision. In parallel, we further introduce a phase prior, represented by domain-invariant phase features, which is integrated into the original image representations to bridge the domain distribution gaps while preserving semantic integrity. Leveraging the synergy of these dual priors, TPSNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on UCDIR benchmarks.

TA-Mem: Tool-Augmented Autonomous Memory Retrieval for LLM in Long-Term Conversational QA

Large Language Model (LLM) has exhibited strong reasoning ability in text-based contexts across various domains, yet the limitation of context window poses challenges for the model on long-range inference tasks and necessitates a memory storage system. While many current storage approaches have been proposed with episodic notes and graph representations of memory, retrieval methods still primarily rely on predefined workflows or static similarity top-k over embeddings. To address this inflexibility, we introduced a novel tool-augmented autonomous memory retrieval framework (TA-Mem), which contains: (1) a memory extraction LLM agent which is prompted to adaptively chuck an input into sub-context based on semantic correlation, and extract information into structured notes, (2) a multi-indexed memory database designed for different types of query methods including both key-based lookup and similarity-based retrieval, (3) a tool-augmented memory retrieval agent which explores the memory autonomously by selecting appropriate tools provided by the database based on the user input, and decides whether to proceed to the next iteration or finalizing the response after reasoning on the fetched memories. The TA-Mem is evaluated on the LoCoMo dataset, achieving significant performance improvements over existing baseline approaches. In addition, an analysis of tool use across different question types also demonstrates the adaptivity of the proposed method.

Tiny-Critic RAG: Empowering Agentic Fallback with Parameter-Efficient Small Language Models

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds Large Language Models (LLMs) to mitigate factual hallucinations. Recent paradigms shift from static pipelines to Modular and Agentic RAG frameworks, granting models autonomy for multi-hop reasoning or self-correction. However, current reflective RAG heavily relies on massive LLMs as universal evaluators. In high-throughput systems, executing complete forward passes for billion-parameter models merely for binary routing introduces severe computational redundancy. Furthermore, in autonomous agent scenarios, inaccurate retrieval causes models to expend excessive tokens on spurious reasoning and redundant tool calls, inflating Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) and costs. We propose Tiny-Critic RAG, decoupling evaluation by deploying a parameter-efficient Small Language Model (SLM) via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Acting as a deterministic gatekeeper, Tiny-Critic employs constrained decoding and non-thinking inference modes for ultra-low latency binary routing. Evaluations on noise-injected datasets demonstrate Tiny-Critic RAG achieves routing accuracy comparable to GPT-4o-mini while reducing latency by an order of magnitude, establishing a highly cost-effective paradigm for agent deployment.

PoseCraft: Tokenized 3D Body Landmark and Camera Conditioning for Photorealistic Human Image Synthesis

Digitizing humans and synthesizing photorealistic avatars with explicit 3D pose and camera controls are central to VR, telepresence, and entertainment. Existing skinning-based workflows require laborious manual rigging or template-based fittings, while neural volumetric methods rely on canonical templates and re-optimization for each unseen pose. We present PoseCraft, a diffusion framework built around tokenized 3D interface: instead of relying only on rasterized geometry as 2D control images, we encode sparse 3D landmarks and camera extrinsics as discrete conditioning tokens and inject them into diffusion via cross-attention. Our approach preserves 3D semantics by avoiding 2D re-projection ambiguity under large pose and viewpoint changes, and produces photorealistic imagery that faithfully captures identity and appearance. To train and evaluate at scale, we also implement GenHumanRF, a data generation workflow that renders diverse supervision from volumetric reconstructions. Our experiments show that PoseCraft achieves significant perceptual quality improvement over diffusion-centric methods, and attains better or comparable metrics to latest volumetric rendering SOTA while better preserving fabric and hair details.

A Scalable Curiosity-Driven Game-Theoretic Framework for Long-Tail Multi-Label Learning in Data Mining

The long-tail distribution, where a few head labels dominate while rare tail labels abound, poses a persistent challenge for large-scale Multi-Label Classification (MLC) in real-world data mining applications. Existing resampling and reweighting strategies often disrupt inter-label dependencies or require brittle hyperparameter tuning, especially as the label space expands to tens of thousands of labels. To address this issue, we propose Curiosity-Driven Game-Theoretic Multi-Label Learning (CD-GTMLL), a scalable cooperative framework that recasts long-tail MLC as a multi-player game - each sub-predictor ("player") specializes in a partition of the label space, collaborating to maximize global accuracy while pursuing intrinsic curiosity rewards based on tail label rarity and inter-player disagreement. This mechanism adaptively injects learning signals into under-represented tail labels without manual balancing or tuning. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that our CD-GTMLL converges to a tail-aware equilibrium and formally links the optimization dynamics to improvements in the Rare-F1 metric. Extensive experiments across 7 benchmarks, including extreme multi-label classification datasets with 30,000+ labels, demonstrate that CD-GTMLL consistently surpasses state-of-the-art methods, with gains up to +1.6% P@3 on Wiki10-31K. Ablation studies further confirm the contributions of both game-theoretic cooperation and curiosity-driven exploration to robust tail performance. By integrating game theory with curiosity mechanisms, CD-GTMLL not only enhances model efficiency in resource-constrained environments but also paves the way for more adaptive learning in imbalanced data scenarios across industries like e-commerce and healthcare.

AgriWorld:A World Tools Protocol Framework for Verifiable Agricultural Reasoning with Code-Executing LLM Agents

Foundation models for agriculture are increasingly trained on massive spatiotemporal data (e.g., multi-spectral remote sensing, soil grids, and field-level management logs) and achieve strong performance on forecasting and monitoring. However, these models lack language-based reasoning and interactive capabilities, limiting their usefulness in real-world agronomic workflows. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) excel at interpreting and generating text, but cannot directly reason over high-dimensional, heterogeneous agricultural datasets. We bridge this gap with an agentic framework for agricultural science. It provides a Python execution environment, AgriWorld, exposing unified tools for geospatial queries over field parcels, remote-sensing time-series analytics, crop growth simulation, and task-specific predictors (e.g., yield, stress, and disease risk). On top of this environment, we design a multi-turn LLM agent, Agro-Reflective, that iteratively writes code, observes execution results, and refines its analysis via an execute-observe-refine loop. We introduce AgroBench, with scalable data generation for diverse agricultural QA spanning lookups, forecasting, anomaly detection, and counterfactual "what-if" analysis. Experiments outperform text-only and direct tool-use baselines, validating execution-driven reflection for reliable agricultural reasoning.

Spectral Gating Networks

Gating mechanisms are ubiquitous, yet a complementary question in feed-forward networks remains under-explored: how to introduce frequency-rich expressivity without sacrificing stability and scalability? This tension is exposed by spline-based Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) parameterizations, where grid refinement can induce parameter growth and brittle optimization in high dimensions. To propose a stability-preserving way to inject spectral capacity into existing MLP/FFN layers under fixed parameter and training budgets, we introduce Spectral Gating Networks (SGN), a drop-in spectral reparameterization. SGN augments a standard activation pathway with a compact spectral pathway and learnable gates that allow the model to start from a stable base behavior and progressively allocate capacity to spectral features during training. The spectral pathway is instantiated with trainable Random Fourier Features (learned frequencies and phases), replacing grid-based splines and removing resolution dependence. A hybrid GELU-Fourier formulation further improves optimization robustness while enhancing high-frequency fidelity. Across vision, NLP, audio, and PDE benchmarks, SGN consistently improves accuracy-efficiency trade-offs under comparable computational budgets, achieving 93.15% accuracy on CIFAR-10 and up to 11.7x faster inference than spline-based KAN variants. Code and trained models will be released.

Rational ANOVA Networks

Deep neural networks typically treat nonlinearities as fixed primitives (e.g., ReLU), limiting both interpretability and the granularity of control over the induced function class. While recent additive models (like KANs) attempt to address this using splines, they often suffer from computational inefficiency and boundary instability. We propose the Rational-ANOVA Network (RAN), a foundational architecture grounded in functional ANOVA decomposition and Padé-style rational approximation. RAN models f(x) as a composition of main effects and sparse pairwise interactions, where each component is parameterized by a stable, learnable rational unit. Crucially, we enforce a strictly positive denominator, which avoids poles and numerical instability while capturing sharp transitions and near-singular behaviors more efficiently than polynomial bases. This ANOVA structure provides an explicit low-order interaction bias for data efficiency and interpretability, while the rational parameterization significantly improves extrapolation. Across controlled function benchmarks and vision classification tasks (e.g., CIFAR-10) under matched parameter and compute budgets, RAN matches or surpasses parameter-matched MLPs and learnable-activation baselines, with better stability and throughput. Code is available at https://github.com/jushengzhang/Rational-ANOVA-Networks.git.