Towards Stable Self-Supervised Object Representations in Unconstrained Egocentric Video

Humans develop visual intelligence through perceiving and interacting with their environment - a self-supervised learning process grounded in egocentric experience. Inspired by this, we ask how can artificial systems learn stable object representations from continuous, uncurated first-person videos without relying on manual annotations. This setting poses challenges of separating, recognizing, and persistently tracking objects amid clutter, occlusion, and ego-motion. We propose EgoViT, a unified vision Transformer framework designed to learn stable object representations from unlabeled egocentric video. EgoViT bootstraps this learning process by jointly discovering and stabilizing "proto-objects" through three synergistic mechanisms: (1) Proto-object Learning, which uses intra-frame distillation to form discriminative representations; (2) Depth Regularization, which grounds these representations in geometric structure; and (3) Teacher-Filtered Temporal Consistency, which enforces identity over time. This creates a virtuous cycle where initial object hypotheses are progressively refined into stable, persistent representations. The framework is trained end-to-end on unlabeled first-person videos and exhibits robustness to geometric priors of varied origin and quality. On standard benchmarks, EgoViT achieves +8.0% CorLoc improvement in unsupervised object discovery and +4.8% mIoU improvement in semantic segmentation, demonstrating its potential to lay a foundation for robust visual abstraction in embodied intelligence.

Evaluating VLMs' Spatial Reasoning Over Robot Motion: A Step Towards Robot Planning with Motion Preferences

Understanding user instructions and object spatial relations in surrounding environments is crucial for intelligent robot systems to assist humans in various tasks. The natural language and spatial reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have the potential to enhance the generalization of robot planners on new tasks, objects, and motion specifications. While foundation models have been applied to task planning, it is still unclear the degree to which they have the capability of spatial reasoning required to enforce user preferences or constraints on motion, such as desired distances from objects, topological properties, or motion style preferences. In this paper, we evaluate the capability of four state-of-the-art VLMs at spatial reasoning over robot motion, using four different querying methods. Our results show that, with the highest-performing querying method, Qwen2.5-VL achieves 71.4% accuracy zero-shot and 75% on a smaller model after fine-tuning, and GPT-4o leads to lower performance. We evaluate two types of motion preferences (object-proximity and path-style), and we also analyze the trade-off between accuracy and computation cost in number of tokens. This work shows some promise in the potential of VLM integration with robot motion planning pipelines.

Retrieving Patient-Specific Radiomic Feature Sets for Transparent Knee MRI Assessment

Classical radiomic features are designed to quantify image appearance and intensity patterns. Compared with end-to-end deep learning (DL) models trained for disease classification, radiomics pipelines with low-dimensional parametric classifiers offer enhanced transparency and interpretability, yet often underperform because of the reliance on population-level predefined feature sets. Recent work on adaptive radiomics uses DL to predict feature weights over a radiomic pool, then thresholds these weights to retain the top-k features from large radiomic pool F (often ~10^3). However, such marginal ranking can over-admit redundant descriptors and overlook complementary feature interactions. We propose a patient-specific feature-set selection framework that predicts a single compact feature set per subject, targeting complementary and diverse evidence rather than marginal top-k features. To overcome the intractable combinatorial search space of F choose k features, our method utilizes a 2-stage retrieval strategy: randomly sample diverse candidate feature sets, then rank these sets with a learned scoring function to select a high-performing feature set for the specific patient. The system consists of a feature-set scorer, and a classifier that performs the final diagnosis. We empirically show that the proposed two-stage retrieval approximates the original exhaustive all k-feature selection. Validating on tasks including ACL tear detection and KL grading for osteoarthritis, the experimental results achieve diagnostic performance, outperforming the top-k approach with the same k values, and competitive with end-to-end DL models while maintaining high transparency. The model generates auditable feature sets that link clinical outcomes to specific anatomical regions and radiomic families, allowing clinicians to inspect which anatomical structures and quantitative descriptors drive the prediction.

InternVLA-A1: Unifying Understanding, Generation and Action for Robotic Manipulation

Prevalent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically built upon Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and demonstrate exceptional proficiency in semantic understanding, but they inherently lack the capability to deduce physical world dynamics. Consequently, recent approaches have shifted toward World Models, typically formulated via video prediction; however, these methods often suffer from a lack of semantic grounding and exhibit brittleness when handling prediction errors. To synergize semantic understanding with dynamic predictive capabilities, we present InternVLA-A1. This model employs a unified Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, coordinating three experts for scene understanding, visual foresight generation, and action execution. These components interact seamlessly through a unified masked self-attention mechanism. Building upon InternVL3 and Qwen3-VL, we instantiate InternVLA-A1 at 2B and 3B parameter scales. We pre-train these models on hybrid synthetic-real datasets spanning InternData-A1 and Agibot-World, covering over 533M frames. This hybrid training strategy effectively harnesses the diversity of synthetic simulation data while minimizing the sim-to-real gap. We evaluated InternVLA-A1 across 12 real-world robotic tasks and simulation benchmark. It significantly outperforms leading models like pi0 and GR00T N1.5, achieving a 14.5\% improvement in daily tasks and a 40\%-73.3\% boost in dynamic settings, such as conveyor belt sorting.

Evo-1: Lightweight Vision-Language-Action Model with Preserved Semantic Alignment

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful framework that unifies perception, language, and control, enabling robots to perform diverse tasks through multimodal understanding. However, current VLA models typically contain massive parameters and rely heavily on large-scale robot data pretraining, leading to high computational costs during training, as well as limited deployability for real-time inference. Moreover, most training paradigms often degrade the perceptual representations of the vision-language backbone, resulting in overfitting and poor generalization to downstream tasks. In this work, we present Evo-1, a lightweight VLA model that reduces computation and improves deployment efficiency, while maintaining strong performance without pretraining on robot data. Evo-1 builds on a native multimodal Vision-Language model (VLM), incorporating a novel cross-modulated diffusion transformer along with an optimized integration module, together forming an effective architecture. We further introduce a two-stage training paradigm that progressively aligns action with perception, preserving the representations of the VLM. Notably, with only 0.77 billion parameters, Evo-1 achieves state-of-the-art results on the Meta-World and RoboTwin suite, surpassing the previous best models by 12.4% and 6.9%, respectively, and also attains a competitive result of 94.8% on LIBERO. In real-world evaluations, Evo-1 attains a 78% success rate with high inference frequency and low memory overhead, outperforming all baseline methods. We release code, data, and model weights to facilitate future research on lightweight and efficient VLA models.

DMF2Mel: A Dynamic Multiscale Fusion Network for EEG-Driven Mel Spectrogram Reconstruction

Decoding speech from brain signals is a challenging research problem. Although existing technologies have made progress in reconstructing the mel spectrograms of auditory stimuli at the word or letter level, there remain core challenges in the precise reconstruction of minute-level continuous imagined speech: traditional models struggle to balance the efficiency of temporal dependency modeling and information retention in long-sequence decoding. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Dynamic Multiscale Fusion Network (DMF2Mel), which consists of four core components: the Dynamic Contrastive Feature Aggregation Module (DC-FAM), the Hierarchical Attention-Guided Multi-Scale Network (HAMS-Net), the SplineMap attention mechanism, and the bidirectional state space module (convMamba). Specifically, the DC-FAM separates speech-related "foreground features" from noisy "background features" through local convolution and global attention mechanisms, effectively suppressing interference and enhancing the representation of transient signals. HAMS-Net, based on the U-Net framework,achieves cross-scale fusion of high-level semantics and low-level details. The SplineMap attention mechanism integrates the Adaptive Gated Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (AGKAN) to combine global context modeling with spline-based local fitting. The convMamba captures long-range temporal dependencies with linear complexity and enhances nonlinear dynamic modeling capabilities. Results on the SparrKULee dataset show that DMF2Mel achieves a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.074 in mel spectrogram reconstruction for known subjects (a 48% improvement over the baseline) and 0.048 for unknown subjects (a 35% improvement over the baseline).Code is available at: https://github.com/fchest/DMF2Mel.

MHANet: Multi-scale Hybrid Attention Network for Auditory Attention Detection

Auditory attention detection (AAD) aims to detect the target speaker in a multi-talker environment from brain signals, such as electroencephalography (EEG), which has made great progress. However, most AAD methods solely utilize attention mechanisms sequentially and overlook valuable multi-scale contextual information within EEG signals, limiting their ability to capture long-short range spatiotemporal dependencies simultaneously. To address these issues, this paper proposes a multi-scale hybrid attention network (MHANet) for AAD, which consists of the multi-scale hybrid attention (MHA) module and the spatiotemporal convolution (STC) module. Specifically, MHA combines channel attention and multi-scale temporal and global attention mechanisms. This effectively extracts multi-scale temporal patterns within EEG signals and captures long-short range spatiotemporal dependencies simultaneously. To further improve the performance of AAD, STC utilizes temporal and spatial convolutions to aggregate expressive spatiotemporal representations. Experimental results show that the proposed MHANet achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer trainable parameters across three datasets, 3 times lower than that of the most advanced model. Code is available at: https://github.com/fchest/MHANet.

SFL-LEO: Asynchronous Split-Federated Learning Design for LEO Satellite-Ground Network Framework

Recently, the rapid development of LEO satellite networks spurs another widespread concern-data processing at satellites. However, achieving efficient computation at LEO satellites in highly dynamic satellite networks is challenging and remains an open problem when considering the constrained computation capability of LEO satellites. For the first time, we propose a novel distributed learning framework named SFL-LEO by combining Federated Learning (FL) with Split Learning (SL) to accommodate the high dynamics of LEO satellite networks and the constrained computation capability of LEO satellites by leveraging the periodical orbit traveling feature. The proposed scheme allows training locally by introducing an asynchronous training strategy, i.e., achieving local update when LEO satellites disconnect with the ground station, to provide much more training space and thus increase the training performance. Meanwhile, it aggregates client-side sub-models at the ground station and then distributes them to LEO satellites by borrowing the idea from the federated learning scheme. Experiment results driven by satellite-ground bandwidth measured in Starlink demonstrate that SFL-LEO provides a similar accuracy performance with the conventional SL scheme because it can perform local training even within the disconnection duration.

Composed Multi-modal Retrieval: A Survey of Approaches and Applications

With the rapid growth of multi-modal data from social media, short video platforms, and e-commerce, content-based retrieval has become essential for efficiently searching and utilizing heterogeneous information. Over time, retrieval techniques have evolved from Unimodal Retrieval (UR) to Cross-modal Retrieval (CR) and, more recently, to Composed Multi-modal Retrieval (CMR). CMR enables users to retrieve images or videos by integrating a reference visual input with textual modifications, enhancing search flexibility and precision. This paper provides a comprehensive review of CMR, covering its fundamental challenges, technical advancements, and categorization into supervised, zero-shot, and semi-supervised learning paradigms. We discuss key research directions, including data augmentation, model architecture, and loss optimization in supervised CMR, as well as transformation frameworks and external knowledge integration in zero-shot CMR. Additionally, we highlight the application potential of CMR in composed image retrieval, video retrieval, and person retrieval, which have significant implications for e-commerce, online search, and public security. Given its ability to refine and personalize search experiences, CMR is poised to become a pivotal technology in next-generation retrieval systems. A curated list of related works and resources is available at: https://github.com/kkzhang95/Awesome-Composed-Multi-modal-Retrieval

Improved Feature Extraction Network for Neuro-Oriented Target Speaker Extraction

The recent rapid development of auditory attention decoding (AAD) offers the possibility of using electroencephalography (EEG) as auxiliary information for target speaker extraction. However, effectively modeling long sequences of speech and resolving the identity of the target speaker from EEG signals remains a major challenge. In this paper, an improved feature extraction network (IFENet) is proposed for neuro-oriented target speaker extraction, which mainly consists of a speech encoder with dual-path Mamba and an EEG encoder with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN). We propose SpeechBiMamba, which makes use of dual-path Mamba in modeling local and global speech sequences to extract speech features. In addition, we propose EEGKAN to effectively extract EEG features that are closely related to the auditory stimuli and locate the target speaker through the subject's attention information. Experiments on the KUL and AVED datasets show that IFENet outperforms the state-of-the-art model, achieving 36\% and 29\% relative improvements in terms of scale-invariant signal-to-distortion ratio (SI-SDR) under an open evaluation condition.