Crowded Video Individual Counting Informed by Social Grouping and Spatial-Temporal Displacement Priors

Video Individual Counting (VIC) is a recently introduced task aiming to estimate pedestrian flux from a video. It extends Video Crowd Counting (VCC) beyond the per-frame pedestrian count. In contrast to VCC that learns to count pedestrians across frames, VIC must identify co-existent pedestrians between frames, which turns out to be a correspondence problem. Existing VIC approaches, however, can underperform in congested scenes such as metro commuting. To address this, we build WuhanMetroCrowd, one of the first VIC datasets that characterize crowded, dynamic pedestrian flows. It features sparse-to-dense density levels, short-to-long video clips, slow-to-fast flow variations, front-to-back appearance changes, and light-to-heavy occlusions. To better adapt VIC approaches to crowds, we rethink the nature of VIC and recognize two informative priors: i) the social grouping prior that indicates pedestrians tend to gather in groups and ii) the spatial-temporal displacement prior that informs an individual cannot teleport physically. The former inspires us to relax the standard one-to-one (O2O) matching used by VIC to one-to-many (O2M) matching, implemented by an implicit context generator and a O2M matcher; the latter facilitates the design of a displacement prior injector, which strengthens not only O2M matching but also feature extraction and model training. These designs jointly form a novel and strong VIC baseline OMAN++. Extensive experiments show that OMAN++ not only outperforms state-of-the-art VIC baselines on the standard SenseCrowd, CroHD, and MovingDroneCrowd benchmarks, but also indicates a clear advantage in crowded scenes, with a 38.12% error reduction on our WuhanMetroCrowd dataset. Code, data, and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/OMAN.

LLHA-Net: A Hierarchical Attention Network for Two-View Correspondence Learning

Establishing the correct correspondence of feature points is a fundamental task in computer vision. However, the presence of numerous outliers among the feature points can significantly affect the matching results, reducing the accuracy and robustness of the process. Furthermore, a challenge arises when dealing with a large proportion of outliers: how to ensure the extraction of high-quality information while reducing errors caused by negative samples. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method called Layer-by-Layer Hierarchical Attention Network, which enhances the precision of feature point matching in computer vision by addressing the issue of outliers. Our method incorporates stage fusion, hierarchical extraction, and an attention mechanism to improve the network's representation capability by emphasizing the rich semantic information of feature points. Specifically, we introduce a layer-by-layer channel fusion module, which preserves the feature semantic information from each stage and achieves overall fusion, thereby enhancing the representation capability of the feature points. Additionally, we design a hierarchical attention module that adaptively captures and fuses global perception and structural semantic information using an attention mechanism. Finally, we propose two architectures to extract and integrate features, thereby improving the adaptability of our network. We conduct experiments on two public datasets, namely YFCC100M and SUN3D, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art techniques in both outlier removal and camera pose estimation. Source code is available at http://www.linshuyuan.com.

A Cascaded Information Interaction Network for Precise Image Segmentation

Visual perception plays a pivotal role in enabling autonomous behavior, offering a cost-effective and efficient alternative to complex multi-sensor systems. However, robust segmentation remains a challenge in complex scenarios. To address this, this paper proposes a cascaded convolutional neural network integrated with a novel Global Information Guidance Module. This module is designed to effectively fuse low-level texture details with high-level semantic features across multiple layers, thereby overcoming the inherent limitations of single-scale feature extraction. This architectural innovation significantly enhances segmentation accuracy, particularly in visually cluttered or blurred environments where traditional methods often fail. Experimental evaluations on benchmark image segmentation datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior precision, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. The results highlight the effectiveness of the approach and its promising potential for deployment in practical robotic applications.

Measuring Social Media Polarization Using Large Language Models and Heuristic Rules

Understanding affective polarization in online discourse is crucial for evaluating the societal impact of social media interactions. This study presents a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and domain-informed heuristics to systematically analyze and quantify affective polarization in discussions on divisive topics such as climate change and gun control. Unlike most prior approaches that relied on sentiment analysis or predefined classifiers, our method integrates LLMs to extract stance, affective tone, and agreement patterns from large-scale social media discussions. We then apply a rule-based scoring system capable of quantifying affective polarization even in small conversations consisting of single interactions, based on stance alignment, emotional content, and interaction dynamics. Our analysis reveals distinct polarization patterns that are event dependent: (i) anticipation-driven polarization, where extreme polarization escalates before well-publicized events, and (ii) reactive polarization, where intense affective polarization spikes immediately after sudden, high-impact events. By combining AI-driven content annotation with domain-informed scoring, our framework offers a scalable and interpretable approach to measuring affective polarization. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/hasanjawad001/llm-social-media-polarization.

Automated electrostatic characterization of quantum dot devices in single- and bilayer heterostructures

As quantum dot (QD)-based spin qubits advance toward larger, more complex device architectures, rapid, automated device characterization and data analysis tools become critical. The orientation and spacing of transition lines in a charge stability diagram (CSD) contain a fingerprint of a QD device's capacitive environment, making these measurements useful tools for device characterization. However, manually interpreting these features is time-consuming, error-prone, and impractical at scale. Here, we present an automated protocol for extracting underlying capacitive properties from CSDs. Our method integrates machine learning, image processing, and object detection to identify and track charge transitions across large datasets without manual labeling. We demonstrate this method using experimentally measured data from a strained-germanium single-quantum-well (planar) and a strained-germanium double-quantum-well (bilayer) QD device. Unlike for planar QD devices, CSDs in bilayer germanium heterostructure exhibit a larger set of transitions, including interlayer tunneling and distinct loading lines for the vertically stacked QDs, making them a powerful testbed for automation methods. By analyzing the properties of many CSDs, we can statistically estimate physically relevant quantities, like relative lever arms and capacitive couplings. Thus, our protocol enables rapid extraction of useful, nontrivial information about QD devices.

Rule-Based Approaches to Atomic Sentence Extraction

Natural language often combines multiple ideas into complex sentences. Atomic sentence extraction, the task of decomposing complex sentences into simpler sentences that each express a single idea, improves performance in information retrieval, question answering, and automated reasoning systems. Previous work has formalized the "split-and-rephrase" task and established evaluation metrics, and machine learning approaches using large language models have improved extraction accuracy. However, these methods lack interpretability and provide limited insight into which linguistic structures cause extraction failures. Although some studies have explored dependency-based extraction of subject-verb-object triples and clauses, no principled analysis has examined which specific clause structures and dependencies lead to extraction difficulties. This study addresses this gap by analyzing how complex sentence structures, including relative clauses, adverbial clauses, coordination patterns, and passive constructions, affect the performance of rule-based atomic sentence extraction. Using the WikiSplit dataset, we implemented dependency-based extraction rules in spaCy, generated 100 gold=standard atomic sentence sets, and evaluated performance using ROUGE and BERTScore. The system achieved ROUGE-1 F1 = 0.6714, ROUGE-2 F1 = 0.478, ROUGE-L F1 = 0.650, and BERTScore F1 = 0.5898, indicating moderate-to-high lexical, structural, and semantic alignment. Challenging structures included relative clauses, appositions, coordinated predicates, adverbial clauses, and passive constructions. Overall, rule-based extraction is reasonably accurate but sensitive to syntactic complexity.

Resolving State Ambiguity in Robot Manipulation via Adaptive Working Memory Recoding

State ambiguity is common in robotic manipulation. Identical observations may correspond to multiple valid behavior trajectories. The visuomotor policy must correctly extract the appropriate types and levels of information from the history to identify the current task phase. However, naively extending the history window is computationally expensive and may cause severe overfitting. Inspired by the continuous nature of human reasoning and the recoding of working memory, we introduce PAM, a novel visuomotor Policy equipped with Adaptive working Memory. With minimal additional training cost in a two-stage manner, PAM supports a 300-frame history window while maintaining high inference speed. Specifically, a hierarchical frame feature extractor yields two distinct representations for motion primitives and temporal disambiguation. For compact representation, a context router with range-specific queries is employed to produce compact context features across multiple history lengths. And an auxiliary objective of reconstructing historical information is introduced to ensure that the context router acts as an effective bottleneck. We meticulously design 7 tasks and verify that PAM can handle multiple scenarios of state ambiguity simultaneously. With a history window of approximately 10 seconds, PAM still supports stable training and maintains inference speeds above 20Hz. Project website: https://tinda24.github.io/pam/

Artificial Intelligence for All? Brazilian Teachers on Ethics, Equity, and the Everyday Challenges of AI in Education

This study examines the perceptions of Brazilian K-12 education teachers regarding the use of AI in education, specifically General Purpose AI. This investigation employs a quantitative analysis approach, extracting information from a questionnaire completed by 346 educators from various regions of Brazil regarding their AI literacy and use. Educators vary in their educational level, years of experience, and type of educational institution. The analysis of the questionnaires shows that although most educators had only basic or limited knowledge of AI (80.3\%), they showed a strong interest in its application, particularly for the creation of interactive content (80.6%), lesson planning (80.2%), and personalized assessment (68.6%). The potential of AI to promote inclusion and personalized learning is also widely recognized (65.5%). The participants emphasized the importance of discussing ethics and digital citizenship, reflecting on technological dependence, biases, transparency, and responsible use of AI, aligning with critical education and the development of conscious students. Despite enthusiasm for the pedagogical potential of AI, significant structural challenges were identified, including a lack of training (43.4%), technical support (41.9%), and limitations of infrastructure, such as low access to computers, reliable Internet connections, and multimedia resources in schools. The study shows that Brazil is still in a bottom-up model for AI integration, missing official curricula to guide its implementation and structured training for teachers and students. Furthermore, effective implementation of AI depends on integrated public policies, adequate teacher training, and equitable access to technology, promoting ethical, inclusive, and contextually grounded adoption of AI in Brazilian K-12 education.

Collaborative Low-Rank Adaptation for Pre-Trained Vision Transformers

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has achieved remarkable success in fine-tuning pre-trained vision transformers for various downstream tasks. Existing studies mainly focus on exploring more parameter-efficient strategies or more effective representation learning schemes. However, these methods either sacrifice fine-tuning performance or introduce excessive trainable parameters, failing to strike a balance between learning performance and parameter efficiency. To address this problem, we propose a novel tuning method named collaborative low-rank adaptation (CLoRA) in this paper. CLoRA consists of base-space sharing and sample-agnostic diversity enhancement (SADE) components. To maintain parameter efficiency while expanding the learning capacity of low-rank modules (LRMs), base-space sharing allows all LRMs to share a set of down/up-projection spaces. In CLoRA, the low-rank matrices obtained from the shared spaces collaboratively construct each LRM. Since the representations extracted by these matrices may contain redundant information, SADE is employed to regularize the similarities among them to encourage diverse representations in the training process. We conduct extensive experiments on widely used image and point cloud datasets to evaluate the performance of CLoRA. Experimental results demonstrate that CLoRA strikes a better balance between learning performance and parameter efficiency, while requiring the fewest GFLOPs for point cloud analysis, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index

Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.