EDGER: EDge-Guided with HEatmap Refinement for Generalizable Image Forgery Localization

Text-guided inpainting has made image forgery increasingly realistic, challenging both SID and IFL. However, existing methods often struggle to point out suspicious signals across domains. To address this problem, we propose EDGER, a patch-based, dual-branch framework that localizes manipulated regions in arbitrary resolution images without sacrificing native resolution. The first branch, Edge-Guided Segmentation, introduces a Frequency-based Edge Detector to emphasize high-frequency inconsistencies at manipulation boundaries, and fine-tunes a SegFormer to fuse RGB and edge features for pixel-level masks. Since edge evidence is most informative only when patches contain both authentic and manipulated pixels, we complement Edge-Guided Segmentation with a Synthetic Heatmapping branch, a classification-based localizer that fine-tunes a CLIP-ViT image encoder with LoRA to flag fully synthetic patches. Together, Synthetic Heatmapping provides coarse, patch-level synthetic priors, while Edge-Guided Segmentation sharpens boundaries within partially manipulated patches, yielding comprehensive localization. Evaluated in the MediaEval 2025, SynthIM challenge, Manipulated Region Localization Task's setting, our approach scales to multi-megapixel imagery and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization. Extensive ablations highlight the complementary roles of frequency-based edge cues and patch-level synthetic priors in driving accurate, resolution-agnostic localization.

An Analysis of Active Learning Algorithms using Real-World Crowd-sourced Text Annotations

Active learning algorithms automatically identify the most informative samples from large amounts of unlabeled data and tremendously reduce human annotation effort in inducing a machine learning model. In a conventional active learning setup, the labeling oracles are assumed to be infallible, that is, they always provide correct answers (in terms of class labels) to the queried unlabeled instances, which cannot be guaranteed in real-world applications. To this end, a body of research has focused on the development of active learning algorithms in the presence of imperfect / noisy oracles. Existing research on active learning with noisy oracles typically simulate the oracles using machine learning models; however, real-world situations are much more challenging, and using ML models to simulate the annotation patterns may not appropriately capture the nuances of real-world annotation challenges. In this research, we first collect annotations of text samples (from 3 benchmark text classification datasets) from crowd-sourced workers through a crowd-sourcing platform. We then conduct extensive empirical studies of 8 commonly used active learning techniques (in conjunction with deep neural networks) using the obtained annotations. Our analyses sheds light on the performance of these techniques under real-world challenges, where annotators can provide incorrect labels, and can also refuse to provide labels. We hope this research will provide valuable insights that will be useful for the deployment of deep active learning systems in real-world applications. The obtained annotations can be accessed at https://github.com/varuntotakura/al_rcta/.

TabEmbed: Benchmarking and Learning Generalist Embeddings for Tabular Understanding

Foundation models have established unified representations for natural language processing, yet this paradigm remains largely unexplored for tabular data. Existing methods face fundamental limitations: LLM-based approaches lack retrieval-compatible vector outputs, whereas text embedding models often fail to capture tabular structure and numerical semantics. To bridge this gap, we first introduce the Tabular Embedding Benchmark (TabBench), a comprehensive suite designed to evaluate the tabular understanding capability of embedding models. We then propose TabEmbed, the first generalist embedding model that unifies tabular classification and retrieval within a shared embedding space. By reformulating diverse tabular tasks as semantic matching problems, TabEmbed leverages large-scale contrastive learning with positive-aware hard negative mining to discern fine-grained structural and numerical nuances. Experimental results on TabBench demonstrate that TabEmbed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art text embedding models, establishing a new baseline for universal tabular representation learning. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/qiangminjie27/TabEmbed and https://huggingface.co/datasets/qiangminjie27/TabBench.

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.

Metric Unreliability in Multimodal Machine Unlearning: A Systematic Analysis and Principled Unified Score

Machine unlearning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is required for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), yet current evaluation practices are inconsistent. We present the first systematic study of metric reliability in multimodal unlearning. Five standard metrics, Forget Accuracy (FA), Retain Accuracy (RA), Membership Inference Attack (MIA), Activation Distance (AD), and JS divergence (JS), yield conflicting method rankings across three VQA benchmarks (MLLMU-Bench, UnLOK-VQA, MMUBench). Kendall tau analysis over 36 unlearned LLaVA-1.5-7B models reveals two opposing clusters, {FA, RA, MIA} and {AD, JS}, with tau_FA_AD = -0.26, reproduced on BLIP-2 OPT-2.7B. Agreement is lower in multimodal VQA (average tau = 0.086) than in unimodal classification (average tau = 0.158; difference = 0.072), indicating that dual image-and-text pathways amplify inconsistency. We introduce the Unified Quality Score (UQS), a composite metric with weights derived from each metric's Spearman correlation with the oracle distance d(M_hat, M_star), where M_star is the oracle model retrained only on the retain set. RA shows the strongest reliability (rho = 0.484, p = 0.003), while FA is negatively correlated (rho = -0.418, p = 0.011). UQS yields stable rankings under 100 random weight perturbations (tau = 0.647 +- 0.262). We release the benchmark, 36 checkpoints, and an interactive leaderboard. Code and pre-computed results are available at https://github.com/neurips26/UnifiedUnl.

Predicting Post Virality with Temporal Cross-Attention over Trend Signals

Current models for predicting social media virality rely heavily on static textual and structural features, effectively ignoring the highly dynamic nature of trend signals. We study whether real-world attention signals can improve the prediction of social-media virality beyond what post text alone reveals. We introduce ViralityNet, an architecture that predicts Reddit post virality by fusing internal platform representations with exogenous temporal signals derived from Wikipedia pageview spikes. We frame virality as a binary classification task that accounts for differences in subreddit scale, labeling posts as viral if they exceed the 90th percentile of per-subreddit engagement and a minimum absolute score threshold. ViralityNet combines four post-level streams: title embeddings, body embeddings, structural metadata, and learned subreddit embeddings with a cross-attention block that queries a daily sliding-window trends matrix encoding the top-512 Wikipedia spike terms from the preceding seven days. Empirical results suggest that incorporating external attention signals yields consistent gains, outperforming text-only baselines by +0.015 AUC-PR and achieving an overall AUC-ROC of 0.836. Overall, we provide evidence that incorporating external attention signals yields measurable improvements over text-only baselines, highlighting the importance of real-world dynamics in shaping online virality.

GeoFlowVLM: Geometry-Aware Joint Uncertainty for Frozen Vision-Language Embedding

Standard dual-encoder vision-language models that map images and text to deterministic points on a shared unit hypersphere through $\ell_2$ normalization typically expose neither \emph{aleatoric} uncertainty (cross-modal ambiguity) nor \emph{epistemic} uncertainty (lack of training-distribution support). Existing post-hoc methods either recover at most one of the two uncertainty components, or ignore the hyperspherical geometry of these models' embeddings. We propose \textbf{GeoFlowVLM} as a post-hoc adapter that learns the joint distribution of paired $\ell_2$-normalised dual-encoder VLM embeddings on the product hypersphere $\mathbb{S}^{d-1} \times \mathbb{S}^{d-1}$ via Riemannian flow matching with a single masked velocity field. A consistency result shows that, in the population limit, the trained network exposes the joint flow and both cross-modal conditional flows as valid Riemannian flow-matching velocity fields on their respective domains. We derive two quantities from this single model: a conditional retrieval entropy that quantifies aleatoric ambiguity with a decision-theoretic interpretation via a Fano-type bound, and a marginal-typicality epistemic score justified by an exact chain-rule decomposition of the joint NLL. This decomposition isolates a cross-modal pointwise-mutual-information term that is structurally discriminative rather than epistemic, and is empirically the only consistently uninformative standalone component. Empirically, the entropy tracks Recall@1 with near-ideal monotonic calibration across three retrieval benchmarks in both directions, and the marginal-typicality sum yields consistently calibrated selective accuracy across four zero-shot classification benchmarks.

Automating Categorization of Scientific Texts with In-Context Learning and Prompt-Chaining in Large Language Models

The relentless expansion of scientific literature presents significant challenges for navigation and knowledge discovery. Within Research Information Retrieval, established tasks such as text summarization and classification remain crucial for enabling researchers and practitioners to effectively navigate this vast landscape, so that efforts have increasingly been focused on developing advanced research information systems. These systems aim not only to provide standard keyword-based search functionalities but also to incorporate capabilities for automatic content categorization within knowledge-intensive organizations across academia and industry. This study systematically evaluates the performance of off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) in analyzing scientific texts according to a given classification scheme. We utilized the hierarchical ORKG taxonomy as a classification framework, employing the FORC dataset as ground truth. We investigated the effectiveness of advanced prompt engineering strategies, namely In-Context Learning (ICL) and Prompt Chaining, and experimentally explored the influence of the LLMs' temperature hyperparameter on classification accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that Prompt Chaining yields superior classification accuracy compared to pure ICL, particularly when applied to the nested structure of the ORKG taxonomy. LLMs with prompt chaining outperform the state-of-the-art models for domain (1st level) prediction and show even better performance for subject (2nd level) prediction compared to the older BERT model. However, LLMs are not yet able to perform well in classifying the topic (3rd level) of research areas based on this specific hierarchical taxonomy, as they only reach about 50% accuracy even with prompt chaining.

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.

Dynamically Acquiring Text Content to Enable the Classification of Lesser-known Entities for Real-world Tasks

Existing Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources often lack the task-specific information required for real-world problems and provide limited coverage of lesser-known or newly introduced entities. For example, business organizations and health care providers may need to be classified into a variety of different taxonomic schemes for specific application tasks. Our goal is to enable domain experts to easily create a task-specific classifier for entities by providing only entity names and gold labels as training data. Our framework then dynamically acquires descriptive text about each entity, which is subsequently used as the basis for producing a text-based classifier. We propose a novel text acquisition method that leverages both web and large language models (LLMs). We evaluate our proposed framework on two classification problems in distinct domains: (i) classifying organizations into Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) Codes, which categorize organizations based on their business activities; and (ii) classifying healthcare providers into healthcare provider taxonomy codes, which represent a provider's medical specialty and area of practice. Our best-performing model achieved macro-averaged F1-scores of 82.3% and 72.9% on the SIC code and healthcare taxonomy code classification tasks, respectively.