AUCH-Net: Action Unit-Based Consistency-Aware Hypergraph Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Facial Expression Recognition

Recently, cross-domain few-shot facial expression recognition (CF-FER) has received considerable attention. However, the performance of existing CF-FER methods is still unsatisfactory due to inferior transferable feature learning under large domain discrepancy and limited target samples. Fortunately, the action units (AUs), which indicate the movements of different facial muscles, provide consistent conceptual semantics for describing expressions within and across domains. Inspired by this, we propose a novel Action Unit-based Consistency-aware Hypergraph Network (AUCH-Net), which constructs consistency-aware hypergraphs on AUs, for CF-FER. Specifically, AUCH-Net presents a new AU feature learning (AFL) module and a new visual feature learning (VFL) module. The AFL module learns AU features under the guidance of a novel relation consistency loss and an AU regularization loss, while the VFL module learns visual features supervised by a relation consistency loss and a classification loss. By learning consistent AU features, AUCH-Net effectively models the connections between AUs and expression categories. As a result, we can bridge the gap between fine-grained facial variations and high-level expression categories, greatly facilitating the learning of transferable feature representations.Extensive experiments on both in-the-lab and in-the-wild datasets show that our method consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Our results clearly show that modeling the relationships among AUs holds significant potential for FER under cross-domain few-shot scenarios.

ASTRA-Net: Anatomy-Specific Transfer and Representation Alignment for Drug-Induced Sleep Endoscopy Segmentation

Quantitative drug-induced sleep endoscopy (DISE) requires reliable airway boundaries at specific anatomical levels. Pixel-level DISE annotations are scarce, and manual contouring limits the scalability of quantitative assessment. To address this limitation, we developed ASTRA-Net for known-plane DISE segmentation with limited real annotations. Stage 1 aligned intermediate ConvNeXt-Base representations from 14,250 unlabeled virtual endoscopy frames derived from computed tomography and real DISE frames. Virtual images were used only for feature alignment. Stage 2 fine-tuned four independent UNet++ decoders on 401 real annotated frames. Structured zero-mask supervision constrained incompatible plane outputs and invalid frames. Six alignment configurations used maximum mean discrepancy, domain adversarial learning, or both objectives. On a hold-out evaluation set of 100 frames, the five-model MMD-only segmentation ensemble achieved a mean Dice of 0.8927, with a 95% image-level bootstrap interval of 0.8631 to 0.9160. The mean intersection over union was 0.8239. A classification- enabled variant of the same alignment configuration reached a restricted four-plane top-1 accuracy of 0.92 on the same hold-out frames. These results indicate that ASTRA-Net can support frame-level, plane-specific DISE boundary delineation when real annotations are limited.

LIST3R: Long-sequence Instance-aware 3D Reconstruction

We present LIST3R, an instance-aware framework for long-sequence 3D reconstruction inspired by the way humans organize spatial memory around stable and recognizable objects. LIST3R organizes long-sequence reconstruction around instance anchors, using them to reconnect fragmented subsequences and consolidate local observations into a coherent global 3D scene. Given a long video, our approach partitions it into overlapping subsequences and builds a structured local instance library for each partial reconstruction, maintaining persistent trackable anchors with semantic and geometric evidence. These anchors are matched across subsequences to recover revisited regions and provide object-aware constraints for fragment alignment, producing a consistent global reconstruction. During this process, the evolving geometric evidence updates the local instance libraries and progressively organizes them into a unified global 3D instance library. Experiments on long-sequence benchmarks show that our method produces more accurate trajectories and higher-quality 3D reconstructions, highlighting the effectiveness of persistent instance anchors for organizing long-horizon 3D reconstruction. Our code is available on the project page: https://yixn965.github.io/LIST3R/.

When to Plan, When to Polish: Noise Level as a Granularity Axis for Diffusion Language Models

Standard tokenwise diffusion LMs keep training corruption and inference commitment at token granularity throughout denoising. At high noise, this leaves scattered local fragments rather than coherent evidence, making it hard to form early coarse structure, exactly what planning-sensitive generation requires. Hierarchical planning methods add coarse stages to separate planning from wording, but they need extra planners, block latents, or two stage designs. We propose Noise Dependent Granularity Control (NDGC), a single-level diffusion method that uses the noise level as a granularity cue. NDGC aligns training exposure and inference commitment with denoising progress. High noise steps use coherent token groups to support early meaning commitment, while low noise steps return to token level refinement. This creates planning like coarse to fine denoising without an explicit planner or hierarchical architecture. Across controlled tests, ablations, and WritingPrompts, NDGC shows earlier skeleton formation, better ordered recovery, and healthier outputs.

Inference-Time Conformal Reasoning with Valid Factuality Control for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly perform multi-step reasoning, where intermediate claims form implicit directed acyclic graphs whose node correctness is structurally conditioned on their ancestors. This makes factuality uncertainty structural, rather than a trivial accumulation of node-wise errors, and necessitates inference-time uncertainty quantification over the reasoning structure. While conformal prediction (CP) offers flexible user-specified factuality control, existing work remains post-hoc and cannot intervene during generation. To fill the gap between CP's flexibility and its post-hoc limitation, we propose an \emph{Inference-Time Conformal Reasoning (ITCR)} framework that integrates CP directly into reasoning graph generation. ITCR learns a structure-level factuality uncertainty function that aggregates claim-level factuality signals over reasoning graphs without complex modeling assumptions. We then design the non-conformity score based on graph-level factuality uncertainty and calibrate the conformal threshold to decide when to stop generation. We theoretically show such generation is nested, yielding valid coverage guarantees for factuality control. Experiments over multiple datasets and coverage objectives demonstrate empirically valid coverage. In downstream reasoning tasks, inference-time calibrated graphs yield more accurate generation than post-hoc pruned graphs.

Inline Critic Steers Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing exhibits heterogeneous difficulty not only across cases but also across regions of an image, motivating refinement approaches that allocate correction to where the model struggles. Existing refinement signals arrive late, after a fully generated image or a completed denoising step. We ask whether such a signal can act within an ongoing forward pass. To investigate this, we probe a frozen image-editing model and find that although generation capability emerges only in the last few layers, the error pattern is already set in early layers (rank correlation \r{ho} = 0.83 with the final-layer error map). Based on this, we introduce Inline Critic, a learnable token that critiques a frozen model's predictions at its intermediate layers and steers its hidden states to refine generation during the forward pass. A three-stage recipe is proposed to stabilize the training from learning how to critique to steering generation. As a result, we achieve state of the art on GEdit-Bench (7.89), a +9.4 gain on RISEBench over the same backbone, and the strongest open-source result on KRIS-Bench (81.92, surpassing GPT-4o). We further provide analyses showing that the critic genuinely shapes the model's attention and prediction updates at subsequent layers.

Conformal Margin Risk Minimization: An Envelope Framework for Robust Learning under Label Noise

Most methods for learning with noisy labels require privileged knowledge such as noise transition matrices, clean subsets or pretrained feature extractors, resources typically unavailable when robustness is most needed. We propose Conformal Margin Risk Minimization (CMRM), a plug-and-play envelope framework that improves any classification loss under label noise by adding a single quantile-calibrated regularization term, with no privileged knowledge or training pipeline modification. CMRM measures the confidence margin between the observed label and competing labels, and thresholds it with a conformal quantile estimated per batch to focus training on high-margin samples while suppressing likely mislabeled ones. We derive a learning bound for CMRM under arbitrary label noise requiring only mild regularity of the margin distribution. Across five base methods and six benchmarks with synthetic and real-world noise, CMRM consistently improves accuracy (up to +3.39%), reduces conformal prediction set size (up to -20.44%) and does not hurt under 0% noise, showing that CMRM captures a method-agnostic uncertainty signal that existing mechanisms did not exploit.

RayMap3R: Inference-Time RayMap for Dynamic 3D Reconstruction

Streaming feed-forward 3D reconstruction enables real-time joint estimation of scene geometry and camera poses from RGB images. However, without explicit dynamic reasoning, streaming models can be affected by moving objects, causing artifacts and drift. In this work, we propose RayMap3R, a training-free streaming framework for dynamic scene reconstruction. We observe that RayMap-based predictions exhibit a static-scene bias, providing an internal cue for dynamic identification. Based on this observation, we construct a dual-branch inference scheme that identifies dynamic regions by contrasting RayMap and image predictions, suppressing their interference during memory updates. We further introduce reset metric alignment and state-aware smoothing to preserve metric consistency and stabilize predicted trajectories. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among streaming approaches on dynamic scene reconstruction across multiple benchmarks.

VLA Knows Its Limits

Action chunking has recently emerged as a standard practice in flow-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, the effect and choice of the execution horizon - the number of actions to be executed from each predicted chunk - remains underexplored. In this work, we first show that varying the execution horizon leads to substantial performance deviations, with performance initially improving and then declining as the horizon increases. To uncover the reasons, we analyze the cross- and self-attention weights in flow-based VLAs and reveal two key phenomena: (i) intra-chunk actions attend invariantly to vision-language tokens, limiting adaptability to environmental changes; and (ii) the initial and terminal action tokens serve as stable anchors, forming latent centers around which intermediate actions are organized. Motivated by these insights, we interpret action self-attention weights as a proxy for the model's predictive limit and propose AutoHorizon, the first test-time method that dynamically estimates the execution horizon for each predicted action chunk to adapt to changing perceptual conditions. Across simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks, AutoHorizon is performant, incurs negligible computational overhead, and generalizes across diverse tasks and flow-based models.

Bi-Level Prompt Optimization for Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge

Large language models (LLMs) have become widely adopted as automated judges for evaluating AI-generated content. Despite their success, aligning LLM-based evaluations with human judgments remains challenging. While supervised fine-tuning on human-labeled data can improve alignment, it is costly and inflexible, requiring new training for each task or dataset. Recent progress in auto prompt optimization (APO) offers a more efficient alternative by automatically improving the instructions that guide LLM judges. However, existing APO methods primarily target text-only evaluations and remain underexplored in multimodal settings. In this work, we study auto prompt optimization for multimodal LLM-as-a-judge, particularly for evaluating AI-generated images. We identify a key bottleneck: multimodal models can only process a limited number of visual examples due to context window constraints, which hinders effective trial-and-error prompt refinement. To overcome this, we propose BLPO, a bi-level prompt optimization framework that converts images into textual representations while preserving evaluation-relevant visual cues. Our bi-level optimization approach jointly refines the judge prompt and the I2T prompt to maintain fidelity under limited context budgets. Experiments on four datasets and three LLM judges demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.