Cross-Slice Knowledge Transfer via Masked Multi-Modal Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Spatial Gene Expression Inference

While spatial transcriptomics (ST) has advanced our understanding of gene expression in tissue context, its high experimental cost limits its large-scale application. Predicting ST from pathology images is a promising, cost-effective alternative, but existing methods struggle to capture complex cross-slide spatial relationships. To address the challenge, we propose SpaHGC, a multi-modal heterogeneous graph-based model that captures both intra-slice and inter-slice spot-spot relationships from histology images. It integrates local spatial context within the target slide and cross-slide similarities computed from image embeddings extracted by a pathology foundation model. These embeddings enable inter-slice knowledge transfer, and SpaHGC further incorporates Masked Graph Contrastive Learning to enhance feature representation and transfer spatial gene expression knowledge from reference to target slides, enabling it to model complex spatial dependencies and significantly improve prediction accuracy. We conducted comprehensive benchmarking on seven matched histology-ST datasets from different platforms, tissues, and cancer subtypes. The results demonstrate that SpaHGC significantly outperforms the existing nine state-of-the-art methods across all evaluation metrics. Additionally, the predictions are significantly enriched in multiple cancer-related pathways, thereby highlighting its strong biological relevance and application potential.

VideoVeritas: AI-Generated Video Detection via Perception Pretext Reinforcement Learning

The growing capability of video generation poses escalating security risks, making reliable detection increasingly essential. In this paper, we introduce VideoVeritas, a framework that integrates fine-grained perception and fact-based reasoning. We observe that while current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capacity, their granular perception ability remains limited. To mitigate this, we introduce Joint Preference Alignment and Perception Pretext Reinforcement Learning (PPRL). Specifically, rather than directly optimizing for detection task, we adopt general spatiotemporal grounding and self-supervised object counting in the RL stage, enhancing detection performance with simple perception pretext tasks. To facilitate robust evaluation, we further introduce MintVid, a light yet high-quality dataset containing 3K videos from 9 state-of-the-art generators, along with a real-world collected subset that has factual errors in content. Experimental results demonstrate that existing methods tend to bias towards either superficial reasoning or mechanical analysis, while VideoVeritas achieves more balanced performance across diverse benchmarks.

Dual-Stream Collaborative Transformer for Image Captioning

Current region feature-based image captioning methods have progressed rapidly and achieved remarkable performance. However, they are still prone to generating irrelevant descriptions due to the lack of contextual information and the over-reliance on generated partial descriptions for predicting the remaining words. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Stream Collaborative Transformer (DSCT) to address this issue by introducing the segmentation feature. The proposed DSCT consolidates and then fuses the region and segmentation features to guide the generation of caption sentences. It contains multiple Pattern-Specific Mutual Attention Encoders (PSMAEs) and Dynamic Nomination Decoders (DNDs). The PSMAE effectively highlights and consolidates the private information of two representations by querying each other. The DND dynamically searches for the most relevant learning blocks to the input textual representations and exploits the homogeneous features between the consolidated region and segmentation features to generate more accurate and descriptive caption sentences. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore how to fuse different pattern-specific features in a dynamic way to bypass their semantic inconsistencies and spatial misalignment issues for image captioning. The experimental results from popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DSCT outperforms the state-of-the-art image captioning models in the literature.

Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling

Long contexts challenge transformers: attention scores dilute across thousands of tokens, critical information is often lost in the middle, and models struggle to adapt to novel patterns at inference time. Recent work on test-time adaptation addresses this by maintaining a form of working memory -- transient parameters updated on the current context -- but existing approaches rely on uniform write policies that waste computation on low-utility regions and suffer from high gradient variance across semantically heterogeneous contexts. In this work, we reframe test-time adaptation as a budget-constrained memory consolidation problem, focusing on which parts of the context should be consolidated into working memory under limited computation. We propose Gdwm (Gated Differentiable Working Memory), a framework that introduces a write controller to gate the consolidation process. The controller estimates Contextual Utility, an information-theoretic measure of long-range contextual dependence, and allocates gradient steps accordingly while maintaining global coverage. Experiments on ZeroSCROLLS and LongBench v2 demonstrate that Gdwm achieves comparable or superior performance with 4$\times$ fewer gradient steps than uniform baselines, establishing a new efficiency-performance Pareto frontier for test-time adaptation.

Supervision-by-Hallucination-and-Transfer: A Weakly-Supervised Approach for Robust and Precise Facial Landmark Detection

High-precision facial landmark detection (FLD) relies on high-resolution deep feature representations. However, low-resolution face images or the compression (via pooling or strided convolution) of originally high-resolution images hinder the learning of such features, thereby reducing FLD accuracy. Moreover, insufficient training data and imprecise annotations further degrade performance. To address these challenges, we propose a weakly-supervised framework called Supervision-by-Hallucination-and-Transfer (SHT) for more robust and precise FLD. SHT contains two novel mutually enhanced modules: Dual Hallucination Learning Network (DHLN) and Facial Pose Transfer Network (FPTN). By incorporating FLD and face hallucination tasks, DHLN is able to learn high-resolution representations with low-resolution inputs for recovering both facial structures and local details and generating more effective landmark heatmaps. Then, by transforming faces from one pose to another, FPTN can further improve landmark heatmaps and faces hallucinated by DHLN for detecting more accurate landmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore weakly-supervised FLD by integrating face hallucination and facial pose transfer tasks. Experimental results of both face hallucination and FLD demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art techniques.

FGTBT: Frequency-Guided Task-Balancing Transformer for Unified Facial Landmark Detection

Recently, deep learning based facial landmark detection (FLD) methods have achieved considerable success. However, in challenging scenarios such as large pose variations, illumination changes, and facial expression variations, they still struggle to accurately capture the geometric structure of the face, resulting in performance degradation. Moreover, the limited size and diversity of existing FLD datasets hinder robust model training, leading to reduced detection accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a Frequency-Guided Task-Balancing Transformer (FGTBT), which enhances facial structure perception through frequency-domain modeling and multi-dataset unified training. Specifically, we propose a novel Fine-Grained Multi-Task Balancing loss (FMB-loss), which moves beyond coarse task-level balancing by assigning weights to individual landmarks based on their occurrence across datasets. This enables more effective unified training and mitigates the issue of inconsistent gradient magnitudes. Additionally, a Frequency-Guided Structure-Aware (FGSA) model is designed to utilize frequency-guided structure injection and regularization to help learn facial structure constraints. Extensive experimental results on popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that the integration of the proposed FMB-loss and FGSA model into our FGTBT framework achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Xi0ngxinyu/FGTBT.

ClusIR: Towards Cluster-Guided All-in-One Image Restoration

All-in-One Image Restoration (AiOIR) aims to recover high-quality images from diverse degradations within a unified framework. However, existing methods often fail to explicitly model degradation types and struggle to adapt their restoration behavior to complex or mixed degradations. To address these issues, we propose ClusIR, a Cluster-Guided Image Restoration framework that explicitly models degradation semantics through learnable clustering and propagates cluster-aware cues across spatial and frequency domains for adaptive restoration. Specifically, ClusIR comprises two key components: a Probabilistic Cluster-Guided Routing Mechanism (PCGRM) and a Degradation-Aware Frequency Modulation Module (DAFMM). The proposed PCGRM disentangles degradation recognition from expert activation, enabling discriminative degradation perception and stable expert routing. Meanwhile, DAFMM leverages the cluster-guided priors to perform adaptive frequency decomposition and targeted modulation, collaboratively refining structural and textural representations for higher restoration fidelity. The cluster-guided synergy seamlessly bridges semantic cues with frequency-domain modulation, empowering ClusIR to attain remarkable restoration results across a wide range of degradations. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks validate that ClusIR reaches competitive performance under several scenarios.

RVLF: A Reinforcing Vision-Language Framework for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation

Gloss-free sign language translation (SLT) is hindered by two key challenges: **inadequate sign representation** that fails to capture nuanced visual cues, and **sentence-level semantic misalignment** in current LLM-based methods, which limits translation quality. To address these issues, we propose a three-stage **r**einforcing **v**ision-**l**anguage **f**ramework (**RVLF**). We build a large vision-language model (LVLM) specifically designed for sign language, and then combine it with reinforcement learning (RL) to adaptively enhance translation performance. First, for a sufficient representation of sign language, RVLF introduces an effective semantic representation learning mechanism that fuses skeleton-based motion cues with semantically rich visual features extracted via DINOv2, followed by instruction tuning to obtain a strong SLT-SFT baseline. Then, to improve sentence-level semantic misalignment, we introduce a GRPO-based optimization strategy that fine-tunes the SLT-SFT model with a reward function combining translation fidelity (BLEU) and sentence completeness (ROUGE), yielding the optimized model termed SLT-GRPO. Our conceptually simple framework yields substantial gains under the gloss-free SLT setting without pre-training on any external large-scale sign language datasets, improving BLEU-4 scores by +5.1, +1.11, +1.4, and +1.61 on the CSL-Daily, PHOENIX-2014T, How2Sign, and OpenASL datasets, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate GRPO into SLT. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of GRPO-based optimization in enhancing both translation quality and semantic consistency.

Veritas: Generalizable Deepfake Detection via Pattern-Aware Reasoning

Deepfake detection remains a formidable challenge due to the complex and evolving nature of fake content in real-world scenarios. However, existing academic benchmarks suffer from severe discrepancies from industrial practice, typically featuring homogeneous training sources and low-quality testing images, which hinder the practical deployments of current detectors. To mitigate this gap, we introduce HydraFake, a dataset that simulates real-world challenges with hierarchical generalization testing. Specifically, HydraFake involves diversified deepfake techniques and in-the-wild forgeries, along with rigorous training and evaluation protocol, covering unseen model architectures, emerging forgery techniques and novel data domains. Building on this resource, we propose Veritas, a multi-modal large language model (MLLM) based deepfake detector. Different from vanilla chain-of-thought (CoT), we introduce pattern-aware reasoning that involves critical reasoning patterns such as "planning" and "self-reflection" to emulate human forensic process. We further propose a two-stage training pipeline to seamlessly internalize such deepfake reasoning capacities into current MLLMs. Experiments on HydraFake dataset reveal that although previous detectors show great generalization on cross-model scenarios, they fall short on unseen forgeries and data domains. Our Veritas achieves significant gains across different OOD scenarios, and is capable of delivering transparent and faithful detection outputs.

GEX: Democratizing Dexterity with Fully-Actuated Dexterous Hand and Exoskeleton Glove

This paper introduces GEX, an innovative low-cost dexterous manipulation system that combines the GX11 tri-finger anthropomorphic hand (11 DoF) with the EX12 tri-finger exoskeleton glove (12 DoF), forming a closed-loop teleoperation framework through kinematic retargeting for high-fidelity control. Both components employ modular 3D-printed finger designs, achieving ultra-low manufacturing costs while maintaining full actuation capabilities. Departing from conventional tendon-driven or underactuated approaches, our electromechanical system integrates independent joint motors across all 23 DoF, ensuring complete state observability and accurate kinematic modeling. This full-actuation architecture enables precise bidirectional kinematic calculations, substantially enhancing kinematic retargeting fidelity between the exoskeleton and robotic hand. The proposed system bridges the cost-performance gap in dexterous manipulation research, providing an accessible platform for acquiring high-quality demonstration data to advance embodied AI and dexterous robotic skill transfer learning.