Urban-ImageNet: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Urban Space Perception

We present Urban-ImageNet, a large-scale multi-modal dataset and evaluation benchmark for urban space perception from user-generated social media imagery. The corpus contains over 2 Million public social media images and paired textual posts collected from Weibo across 61 urban sites in 24 Chinese cities across 2019-2025, with controlled benchmark subsets at 1K, 10K, and 100K scale and a full 2M corpus for large-scale training and evaluation. Urban-ImageNet is organized by HUSIC, a Hierarchical Urban Space Image Classification framework that defines a 10-class taxonomy grounded in urban theory. The taxonomy is designed to distinguish activated and non-activated public spaces, exterior and interior urban environments, accommodation spaces, consumption content, portraits, and non-spatial social-media content. Rather than treating urban imagery as generic scene data, Urban-ImageNet evaluates whether machine perception models can capture spatial, social, and functional distinctions that are central to urban studies. The benchmark supports three tasks within one standardized library: (T1) urban scene semantic classification, (T2) cross-modal image-text retrieval, and (T3) instance segmentation. Our experiments evaluate representative vision, vision-language, and segmentation models, revealing strong performance on supervised scene classification but more challenging behavior in cross-modal retrieval and instance-level urban object segmentation. A multi-scale study further examines how model performance changes as balanced training data increases from 1K, 10K to 100K images. Urban-ImageNet provides a unified, theory-grounded, multi-city benchmark for evaluating how AI systems perceive and interpret contemporary urban spaces across modalities, scales, and task formulations. Dataset and benchmark are available at: huggingface.co/datasets/Yiwei-Ou/Urban-ImageNet and github.com/yiasun/dataset-2.

cantnlp@DravidianLangTech 2026: organic domain adaptation improves multi-class hope speech detection in Tulu

This paper presents our systems and results for the Hope Speech Detection in Code-Mixed Tulu Language shared task at the Sixth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages (DravidianLangTech-2026). We trained an XLM-RoBERTa-based text classification system for detecting hope speech in code-mixed Tulu social media comments. We compared this organically adapted hope speech detection model with our baseline model. On the development set, the organically adapted model outperformed the baseline system. While our submitted systems performed more modestly on the official test set, these results suggest that further adapting XLM-RoBERTa on organically collected Tulu social media text containing code-mixed and mixed-script variation can improve hope speech detection in code-mixed Tulu.

CMKL: Modality-Aware Continual Learning for Evolving Biomedical Knowledge Graphs

Biomedical knowledge graphs are increasingly large, dynamic, and multimodal, driven by rapid advances in biotechnology such as high-throughput sequencing. Machine learning models can infer previously unobserved biomedical relationships and characterize biomedical entities in these graphs, but existing knowledge graph embedding methods and their continual learning extensions either assume static graph structure or fail to exploit multimodal information under evolving data distributions. They also apply uniform regularization across all model parameters, ignoring that different modalities may exhibit distinct forgetting dynamics as the graph evolves. We propose the Continual Multimodal Knowledge Graph Learner (CMKL), a CL framework for biomedical KGs that natively encodes structure, text, and molecules, fuses them through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) router, and protects previously learned knowledge with standard EWC regularization and a K-means-diverse multimodal replay buffer. We evaluate CMKL on a 129K-entity biomedical continual benchmark with 10 tasks. On continual biomedical entity classification, CMKL reaches AP 0.591 versus 0.370 for the strongest structural baseline, a 60% gain that is driven by access to multimodal features and preserved across the sequence with near-zero forgetting (AF 0.008). On continual relationship prediction, CMKL reaches AP $0.062$, matching Naive Sequential and EWC (0.058) within seed noise and outperforming Joint Training (0.047, p=0.045) and LKGE (0.039). A frozen-text ablation reaches AP 0.136, more than double any jointly trained model, yet that signal is unreachable by margin-ranking gradients: the greedy-modality asymmetry lives at the representation level, not the fusion level, and MoE routing manages it by suppressing the unreachable modality without forcing it through a learned bottleneck. Code: github.com/yradwan147/cmkl-neurips2026

Complex-Valued Phase-Coherent Transformer

Complex-valued Transformers have largely inherited softmax attention from real-valued architectures. However, row-normalised token competition is not necessarily aligned with phase-preserving computation. In this paper, we introduce the Phase-Coherent Transformer (PCT), which applies a real-valued, element-independent, smooth gate to L2-normalised complex query-key similarities. PCT replaces token competition with token-non-competing attention and is designed to preserve phase information across layers. Across mid-scale benchmarks spanning long-range memory, hierarchical long-range reasoning, positional retrieval, phase-based memory and superposition, and image classification, PCT shows strong generalisation across task categories. Under parameter-fair comparison, PCT consistently outperforms both the standard softmax Transformer and its direct complex-valued counterpart. Moreover, even on tasks traditionally considered difficult for complex-valued neural networks, such as NIAH and LRA-Text, PCT remains competitive with Multiscreen, the strongest real-valued NN baseline in our comparison. Experiments introducing gates that deliberately violate the PCT conditions show that the design is not incidental: smooth gates that preserve negatively aligned phase components remain strong, whereas gates that delete such components collapse on long-range retrieval, and gates whose outputs become excessively large suffer clear performance degradation. PCT also shows no depth-related accuracy collapse across the tested depth range. These results support introducing multi-layer phase-coherent structure into attention as a promising design principle for achieving generalisation in complex-valued Transformers.

FinMoji: A Framework for Emoji-driven Sentiment Analysis in Financial Social Media

This paper explores the use of emojis in financial sentiment analysis, focusing on the social media platform StockTwits. Emojis, increasingly prevalent in digital communication, have potential as compact indicators of investor sentiment, which can be critical for predicting market trends. Our study examines whether emojis alone can serve as reliable proxies for financial sentiment and how they compare with traditional text-based analysis. We conduct a series of experiments using logistic regression and transformer models. We further analyze the performance, computational efficiency, and data requirements of emoji-based versus text-based sentiment classification. Using a balanced dataset of about 528,000 emoji-containing StockTwits posts, we find that emoji-only models achieve F1 approximately 0.75, lower than text-emoji combined models, which achieve F1 approximately 0.88, but with far lower computational cost. This is a useful feature in time-sensitive settings such as high-frequency trading. Furthermore, certain emojis and emoji pairs exhibit strong predictive power for market sentiment, demonstrating over 90 percent accuracy in predicting bullish or bearish trends. Finally, our research reveals large statistical differences in emoji usage between financial and general social media contexts, stressing the need for domain-specific sentiment analysis models.

PHAGE: Patent Heterogeneous Attention-Guided Graph Encoder for Representation Learning

Patent claims form a directed dependency structure in which dependent claims inherit and refine the scope of earlier claims; however, existing patent encoders linearize claims as text and discard this hierarchy. Directly encoding this structure into self-attention poses two challenges: claim dependencies mix relation types that differ in semantics and extraction reliability, and the dependency graph is defined over claims while Transformers attend over tokens. PHAGE addresses the first challenge through a deterministic graph construction pipeline that separates near-deterministic legal citations from noisier rule-based technical relations, preserving type distinctions as heterogeneous edges. It addresses the second through a connectivity mask and learnable relation-aware biases that lift claim-level topology into token-level attention, allowing the encoder to differentially weight each relation type. A dual-granularity contrastive objective then aligns representations with both inter-patent taxonomy and intra-patent topology. PHAGE outperforms all baselines on classification, retrieval, and clustering, showing that intra-document claim topology is a stronger inductive bias than inter-document structure and that this bias persists in the encoder weights after training.

Cross-Modal Semantic-Enhanced Diffusion Framework for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading

Automated grading of diabetic retinopathy (DR) faces several critical challenges: subtle inter-grade visual distinctions in fine-grained lesion patterns, distributional discrepancies induced by heterogeneous imaging devices and acquisition conditions, and the inherent inability of purely visual approaches to exploit clinical semantic knowledge. In this paper, we propose CLIP-Guided Semantic Diffusion (CGSD), a DR grading framework that synergistically integrates vision-language pretraining with diffusion probabilistic modeling. We adopt a domain-specific vision-language model tailored for DR grading as the semantic guidance module and adapt it to the target domain via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), effectively bridging the distributional gap between the pretrained model and the target dataset with only a minimal number of trainable parameters. Building on this foundation, we construct a cross-modal semantic conditioning vector by computing the dot product between image features and the text description features of each DR grade, yielding a joint representation that simultaneously encodes visual content and clinical-grade semantics. This vector serves as the conditioning signal for the diffusion denoising network, replacing the structurally complex dual-branch visual prior employed in existing diffusion-based classification methods. Experiments on the APTOS 2019 dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 87.5% and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.731, outperforming a variety of representative methods. Ablation studies further validate the independent contribution of each constituent module.

SKG-VLA: Scene Knowledge Graph Priors for Structured Scene Semantics and Multimodal Reasoning for Decision Making

Decision making in large-scale complaint handling systems increasingly relies on heterogeneous evidence, including complaint narratives, screenshots, order metadata, historical interactions, and platform policies. Existing complaint understanding systems mainly perform shallow classification or template matching over isolated modalities, while underutilizing explicit scene structure, rule knowledge, and cross-evidence dependencies. To address this limitation, we present SKG-VLA for multimodal complaint decision making. The core idea is to model each case as a structured complaint scene and represent its decision-relevant semantics with a \emph{Scene Knowledge Graph} (SKG), which organizes complaint entities, evidence items, policy clauses, temporal events, transactional states, and action-relevant relations into a unified graph. Based on SKG, we build a data synthesis pipeline that generates complaint scene descriptions, rule-consistent graph generalizations, question-answer supervision, and decision recommendations. We further construct a large-scale complaint scene dataset with both text-only and multimodal in-domain benchmarks. Finally, we adopt a three-stage training strategy -- domain-adaptive pre-training, task-oriented instruction fine-tuning, and end-to-end multimodal alignment -- to inject structured scene priors into a multimodal decision model. Experiments show that SKG-VLA consistently improves policy-grounded reasoning, complaint decision accuracy, long-tail generalization, and robustness under incomplete evidence.

Enabling Federated Inference via Unsupervised Consensus Embedding

Cooperative inference across independently deployed machine learning models is increasingly desirable in distributed environments, as there is a growing need to leverage multiple models while keeping their data and model parameters private. However, existing cooperative frameworks typically rely on sharing input data, model parameters, or a common encoder, which limits their applicability in privacy-sensitive or cross-organizational settings. To address this challenge, we propose Consensus Embedding-based Federated Inference (CE-FI), a framework that enables pretrained models to cooperate at inference time without sharing model parameters or raw inputs and without assuming a common encoder. CE-FI introduces two components: a Consensus Embedding (CE) layer that maps heterogeneous intermediate representations into a common embedding space, and a Cooperative Output (CO) layer that produces predictions from these embeddings. Both layers are trained using shared unlabeled data only, so the cooperative stage does not require additional labeled data. Experiments on image classification benchmarks -- CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 -- under diverse non-IID conditions show that CE-FI consistently outperforms solo inference and performs comparably to conventional methods that require stronger sharing assumptions. Additional evaluations on text and time-series tasks indicate applicability beyond image classification, although performance depends on the ensemble strategy. Further analysis identifies representation alignment as the primary bottleneck.

CLAD: A Clustered Label-Agnostic Federated Learning Framework for Joint Anomaly Detection and Attack Classification

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) has created a massive, heterogeneous attack surface that challenges traditional network security mechanisms. While Federated Learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving alternative to centralized Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), standard approaches struggle to generalize across diverse device behaviors and typically fail to utilize the vast amounts of unlabeled data present in realistic edge environments. To bridge these gaps, we propose CLAD, a holistic framework that seamlessly incorporates Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) with a novel Dual-Mode Micro-Architecture ($\text{DM}^2\text{A}$). This unified approach simultaneously tackles the two primary bottlenecks of IoT security: device heterogeneity and label scarcity. The $\text{DM}^2\text{A}$ component features a shared encoder followed by two branches, enabling joint unsupervised anomaly detection and supervised attack classification; this allows the framework to harvest intelligence from both labeled and unlabeled clients. Concurrently, the clustering component dynamically groups devices with congruent traffic patterns, preventing global model divergence. By carefully combining these elements, CLAD ensures that no data is discarded and distinct operational patterns are preserved. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that this integrated approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 30% relative improvement in detection performance in scenarios with 80% unlabeled clients, with only half the communication cost.