Large Language Model and Formal Concept Analysis: a comparative study for Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is a research field finding increasing applications: historically from document retrieving, to sentiment analysis and text summarization. Large Language Models (LLM) are currently a major trend in text processing, but few works study their usefulness for this task. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) has recently been presented as a candidate for topic modeling, but no real applied case study has been conducted. In this work, we compare LLM and FCA to better understand their strengths and weakneses in the topic modeling field. FCA is evaluated through the CREA pipeline used in past experiments on topic modeling and visualization, whereas GPT-5 is used for the LLM. A strategy based on three prompts is applied with GPT-5 in a zero-shot setup: topic generation from document batches, merging of batch results into final topics, and topic labeling. A first experiment reuses the teaching materials previously used to evaluate CREA, while a second experiment analyzes 40 research articles in information systems to compare the extracted topics with the underling subfields.

Interactive Spatial-Frequency Fusion Mamba for Multi-Modal Image Fusion

Multi-Modal Image Fusion (MMIF) aims to combine images from different modalities to produce fused images, retaining texture details and preserving significant information. Recently, some MMIF methods incorporate frequency domain information to enhance spatial features. However, these methods typically rely on simple serial or parallel spatial-frequency fusion without interaction. In this paper, we propose a novel Interactive Spatial-Frequency Fusion Mamba (ISFM) framework for MMIF. Specifically, we begin with a Modality-Specific Extractor (MSE) to extract features from different modalities. It models long-range dependencies across the image with linear computational complexity. To effectively leverage frequency information, we then propose a Multi-scale Frequency Fusion (MFF). It adaptively integrates low-frequency and high-frequency components across multiple scales, enabling robust representations of frequency features. More importantly, we further propose an Interactive Spatial-Frequency Fusion (ISF). It incorporates frequency features to guide spatial features across modalities, enhancing complementary representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on six MMIF datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our ISFM can achieve better performances than other state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Namn23/ISFM.

MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agents

Most Large Language Model (LLM) agent memory systems rely on a small set of static, hand-designed operations for extracting memory. These fixed procedures hard-code human priors about what to store and how to revise memory, making them rigid under diverse interaction patterns and inefficient on long histories. To this end, we present \textbf{MemSkill}, which reframes these operations as learnable and evolvable memory skills, structured and reusable routines for extracting, consolidating, and pruning information from interaction traces. Inspired by the design philosophy of agent skills, MemSkill employs a \emph{controller} that learns to select a small set of relevant skills, paired with an LLM-based \emph{executor} that produces skill-guided memories. Beyond learning skill selection, MemSkill introduces a \emph{designer} that periodically reviews hard cases where selected skills yield incorrect or incomplete memories, and evolves the skill set by proposing refinements and new skills. Together, MemSkill forms a closed-loop procedure that improves both the skill-selection policy and the skill set itself. Experiments on LoCoMo, LongMemEval, HotpotQA, and ALFWorld demonstrate that MemSkill improves task performance over strong baselines and generalizes well across settings. Further analyses shed light on how skills evolve, offering insights toward more adaptive, self-evolving memory management for LLM agents.

LD-SLRO: Latent Diffusion Structured Light for 3-D Reconstruction of Highly Reflective Objects

Fringe projection profilometry-based 3-D reconstruction of objects with high reflectivity and low surface roughness remains a significant challenge. When measuring such glossy surfaces, specular reflection and indirect illumination often lead to severe distortion or loss of the projected fringe patterns. To address these issues, we propose a latent diffusion-based structured light for reflective objects (LD-SLRO). Phase-shifted fringe images captured from highly reflective surfaces are first encoded to extract latent representations that capture surface reflectance characteristics. These latent features are then used as conditional inputs to a latent diffusion model, which probabilistically suppresses reflection-induced artifacts and recover lost fringe information, yielding high-quality fringe images. The proposed components, including the specular reflection encoder, time-variant channel affine layer, and attention modules, further improve fringe restoration quality. In addition, LD-SLRO provides high flexibility in configuring the input and output fringe sets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves both fringe quality and 3-D reconstruction accuracy over state-of-the-art methods, reducing the average root-mean-squared error from 1.8176 mm to 0.9619 mm.

A Novel Differential Pathlength Factor Model for Near-Infrared Diffuse Optical Imaging

Near infrared diffuse optical imaging can be performed in reflectance and transmission mode and relies on physical models along with measurements to extract information on changes in chromophore concentration. Continuous-wave near-infrared diffuse optical imaging relies on accurate differential pathlength factors (DPFs) for quantitative chromophore estimation. Existing DPF definitions inherit formulation-dependent limitations that can introduce large errors in modified Beer--Lambert law analyses. These errors are significantly higher at smaller source-detector separations in a reflectance mode of measurement. This minimizes their applicability in situations where large area detection is used and also when signal depth is varying. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we derive two distance- and property-dependent DPF models one ideal and one experimentally practical and benchmark them against standard formulations. The proposed models achieve errors below 10 percent across broad optical conditions, whereas conventional DPFs can exceed 100 percent error. The theoretical predictions are further validated using controlled phantom experiments, demonstrating improved quantitative accuracy in CW-NIR imaging.

Reformulating AI-based Multi-Object Relative State Estimation for Aleatoric Uncertainty-based Outlier Rejection of Partial Measurements

Precise localization with respect to a set of objects of interest enables mobile robots to perform various tasks. With the rise of edge devices capable of deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) for real-time inference, it stands to reason to use artificial intelligence (AI) for the extraction of object-specific, semantic information from raw image data, such as the object class and the relative six degrees of freedom (6-DoF) pose. However, fusing such AI-based measurements in an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) requires quantifying the DNNs' uncertainty and outlier rejection capabilities. This paper presents the benefits of reformulating the measurement equation in AI-based, object-relative state estimation. By deriving an EKF using the direct object-relative pose measurement, we can decouple the position and rotation measurements, thus limiting the influence of erroneous rotation measurements and allowing partial measurement rejection. Furthermore, we investigate the performance and consistency improvements for state estimators provided by replacing the fixed measurement covariance matrix of the 6-DoF object-relative pose measurements with the predicted aleatoric uncertainty of the DNN.

Kanade: A Simple Disentangled Tokenizer for Spoken Language Modeling

A good language model starts with a good tokenizer. Tokenization is especially important for speech modeling, which must handle continuous signals that mix linguistic and non-linguistic information. A speech tokenizer should extract phonetics and prosody, suppress linguistically irrelevant information like speaker identity, and enable high-quality synthesis. We present Kanade, a single-layer disentangled speech tokenizer that realizes this ideal. Kanade separates out acoustic constants to create a single stream of tokens that captures rich phonetics and prosody. It does so without the need for auxiliary methods that existing disentangled codecs often rely on. Experiments show that Kanade achieves state-of-the-art speaker disentanglement and lexical availability, while maintaining excellent reconstruction quality.

SVD-ViT: Does SVD Make Vision Transformers Attend More to the Foreground?

Vision Transformers (ViT) have been established as large-scale foundation models. However, because self-attention operates globally, they lack an explicit mechanism to distinguish foreground from background. As a result, ViT may learn unnecessary background features and artifacts, leading to degraded classification performance. To address this issue, we propose SVD-ViT, which leverages singular value decomposition (SVD) to prioritize the learning of foreground features. SVD-ViT consists of three components-\textbf{SPC module}, \textbf{SSVA}, and \textbf{ID-RSVD}-and suppresses task-irrelevant factors such as background noise and artifacts by extracting and aggregating singular vectors that capture object foreground information. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves classification accuracy and effectively learns informative foreground representations while reducing the impact of background noise.

Deep learning enables urban change profiling through alignment of historical maps

Prior to modern Earth observation technologies, historical maps provide a unique record of long-term urban transformation and offer a lens on the evolving identity of cities. However, extracting consistent and fine-grained change information from historical map series remains challenging due to spatial misalignment, cartographic variation, and degrading document quality, limiting most analyses to small-scale or qualitative approaches. We propose a fully automated, deep learning-based framework for fine-grained urban change analysis from large collections of historical maps, built on a modular design that integrates dense map alignment, multi-temporal object detection, and change profiling. This framework shifts the analysis of historical maps from ad hoc visual comparison toward systematic, quantitative characterization of urban change. Experiments demonstrate the robust performance of the proposed alignment and object detection methods. Applied to Paris between 1868 and 1937, the framework reveals the spatial and temporal heterogeneity in urban transformation, highlighting its relevance for research in the social sciences and humanities. The modular design of our framework further supports adaptation to diverse cartographic contexts and downstream applications.

Nemotron ColEmbed V2: Top-Performing Late Interaction embedding models for Visual Document Retrieval

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have been popular for generative applications, powering language models by injecting external knowledge. Companies have been trying to leverage their large catalog of documents (e.g. PDFs, presentation slides) in such RAG pipelines, whose first step is the retrieval component. Dense retrieval has been a popular approach, where embedding models are used to generate a dense representation of the user query that is closer to relevant content embeddings. More recently, VLM-based embedding models have become popular for visual document retrieval, as they preserve visual information and simplify the indexing pipeline compared to OCR text extraction. Motivated by the growing demand for visual document retrieval, we introduce Nemotron ColEmbed V2, a family of models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ViDoRe benchmarks. We release three variants - with 3B, 4B, and 8B parameters - based on pre-trained VLMs: NVIDIA Eagle 2 with Llama 3.2 3B backbone, Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct and Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, respectively. The 8B model ranks first on the ViDoRe V3 leaderboard as of February 03, 2026, achieving an average NDCG@10 of 63.42. We describe the main techniques used across data processing, training, and post-training - such as cluster-based sampling, hard-negative mining, bidirectional attention, late interaction, and model merging - that helped us build our top-performing models. We also discuss compute and storage engineering challenges posed by the late interaction mechanism and present experiments on how to balance accuracy and storage with lower dimension embeddings.