Semantic Distance Measurement based on Multi-Kernel Gaussian Processes

Semantic distance measurement is a fundamental problem in computational linguistics, providing a quantitative characterization of similarity or relatedness between text segments, and underpinning tasks such as text retrieval and text classification. From a mathematical perspective, a semantic distance can be viewed as a metric defined on a space of texts or on a representation space derived from them. However, most classical semantic distance methods are essentially fixed, making them difficult to adapt to specific data distributions and task requirements. In this paper, a semantic distance measure based on multi-kernel Gaussian processes (MK-GP) was proposed. The latent semantic function associated with texts was modeled as a Gaussian process, with its covariance function given by a combined kernel combining Matérn and polynomial components. The kernel parameters were learned automatically from data under supervision, rather than being hand-crafted. This semantic distance was instantiated and evaluated in the context of fine-grained sentiment classification with large language models under an in-context learning (ICL) setup. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed measure.

Seeing Beyond the Scene: Analyzing and Mitigating Background Bias in Action Recognition

Human action recognition models often rely on background cues rather than human movement and pose to make predictions, a behavior known as background bias. We present a systematic analysis of background bias across classification models, contrastive text-image pretrained models, and Video Large Language Models (VLLM) and find that all exhibit a strong tendency to default to background reasoning. Next, we propose mitigation strategies for classification models and show that incorporating segmented human input effectively decreases background bias by 3.78%. Finally, we explore manual and automated prompt tuning for VLLMs, demonstrating that prompt design can steer predictions towards human-focused reasoning by 9.85%.

CLIP-Joint-Detect: End-to-End Joint Training of Object Detectors with Contrastive Vision-Language Supervision

Conventional object detectors rely on cross-entropy classification, which can be vulnerable to class imbalance and label noise. We propose CLIP-Joint-Detect, a simple and detector-agnostic framework that integrates CLIP-style contrastive vision-language supervision through end-to-end joint training. A lightweight parallel head projects region or grid features into the CLIP embedding space and aligns them with learnable class-specific text embeddings via InfoNCE contrastive loss and an auxiliary cross-entropy term, while all standard detection losses are optimized simultaneously. The approach applies seamlessly to both two-stage and one-stage architectures. We validate it on Pascal VOC 2007+2012 using Faster R-CNN and on the large-scale MS COCO 2017 benchmark using modern YOLO detectors (YOLOv11), achieving consistent and substantial improvements while preserving real-time inference speed. Extensive experiments and ablations demonstrate that joint optimization with learnable text embeddings markedly enhances closed-set detection performance across diverse architectures and datasets.

Using Large Language Models To Translate Machine Results To Human Results

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed medical imaging, with computer vision (CV) systems achieving state-of-the-art performance in classification and detection tasks. However, these systems typically output structured predictions, leaving radiologists responsible for translating results into full narrative reports. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, offer new opportunities to bridge this gap by generating diagnostic narratives from structured findings. This study introduces a pipeline that integrates YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 for anomaly detection in chest X-ray images with a large language model (LLM) to generate natural-language radiology reports. The YOLO models produce bounding-box predictions and class labels, which are then passed to the LLM to generate descriptive findings and clinical summaries. YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 are compared in terms of detection accuracy, inference latency, and the quality of generated text, as measured by cosine similarity to ground-truth reports. Results show strong semantic similarity between AI and human reports, while human evaluation reveals GPT-4 excels in clarity (4.88/5) but exhibits lower scores for natural writing flow (2.81/5), indicating that current systems achieve clinical accuracy but remain stylistically distinguishable from radiologist-authored text.

ProGuard: Towards Proactive Multimodal Safeguard

The rapid evolution of generative models has led to a continuous emergence of multimodal safety risks, exposing the limitations of existing defense methods. To address these challenges, we propose ProGuard, a vision-language proactive guard that identifies and describes out-of-distribution (OOD) safety risks without the need for model adjustments required by traditional reactive approaches. We first construct a modality-balanced dataset of 87K samples, each annotated with both binary safety labels and risk categories under a hierarchical multimodal safety taxonomy, effectively mitigating modality bias and ensuring consistent moderation across text, image, and text-image inputs. Based on this dataset, we train our vision-language base model purely through reinforcement learning (RL) to achieve efficient and concise reasoning. To approximate proactive safety scenarios in a controlled setting, we further introduce an OOD safety category inference task and augment the RL objective with a synonym-bank-based similarity reward that encourages the model to generate concise descriptions for unseen unsafe categories. Experimental results show that ProGuard achieves performance comparable to closed-source large models on binary safety classification, substantially outperforms existing open-source guard models on unsafe content categorization. Most notably, ProGuard delivers a strong proactive moderation ability, improving OOD risk detection by 52.6% and OOD risk description by 64.8%.

SuperCLIP: CLIP with Simple Classification Supervision

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) achieves strong generalization in vision-language tasks by aligning images and texts in a shared embedding space. However, recent findings show that CLIP-like models still underutilize fine-grained semantic signals in text, and this issue becomes even more pronounced when dealing with long and detailed captions. This stems from CLIP's training objective, which optimizes only global image-text similarity and overlooks token-level supervision - limiting its ability to achieve fine-grained visual-text alignment. To address this, we propose SuperCLIP, a simple yet effective framework that augments contrastive learning with classification-based supervision. By adding only a lightweight linear layer to the vision encoder, SuperCLIP leverages token-level cues to enhance visual-textual alignment - with just a 0.077% increase in total FLOPs, and no need for additional annotated data. Experiments show that SuperCLIP consistently improves zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and purely visual tasks. These gains hold regardless of whether the model is trained on original web data or rich re-captioned data, demonstrating SuperCLIP's ability to recover textual supervision in both cases. Furthermore, SuperCLIP alleviates CLIP's small-batch performance drop through classification-based supervision that avoids reliance on large batch sizes. Code and models will be made open source.

Item Region-based Style Classification Network (IRSN): A Fashion Style Classifier Based on Domain Knowledge of Fashion Experts

Fashion style classification is a challenging task because of the large visual variation within the same style and the existence of visually similar styles. Styles are expressed not only by the global appearance, but also by the attributes of individual items and their combinations. In this study, we propose an item region-based fashion style classification network (IRSN) to effectively classify fashion styles by analyzing item-specific features and their combinations in addition to global features. IRSN extracts features of each item region using item region pooling (IRP), analyzes them separately, and combines them using gated feature fusion (GFF). In addition, we improve the feature extractor by applying a dual-backbone architecture that combines a domain-specific feature extractor and a general feature extractor pre-trained with a large-scale image-text dataset. In experiments, applying IRSN to six widely-used backbones, including EfficientNet, ConvNeXt, and Swin Transformer, improved style classification accuracy by an average of 6.9% and a maximum of 14.5% on the FashionStyle14 dataset and by an average of 7.6% and a maximum of 15.1% on the ShowniqV3 dataset. Visualization analysis also supports that the IRSN models are better than the baseline models at capturing differences between similar style classes.

Retrieving Objects from 3D Scenes with Box-Guided Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation

Locating and retrieving objects from scene-level point clouds is a challenging problem with broad applications in robotics and augmented reality. This task is commonly formulated as open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. Although recent methods demonstrate strong performance, they depend heavily on SAM and CLIP to generate and classify 3D instance masks from images accompanying the point cloud, leading to substantial computational overhead and slow processing that limit their deployment in real-world settings. Open-YOLO 3D alleviates this issue by using a real-time 2D detector to classify class-agnostic masks produced directly from the point cloud by a pretrained 3D segmenter, eliminating the need for SAM and CLIP and significantly reducing inference time. However, Open-YOLO 3D often fails to generalize to object categories that appear infrequently in the 3D training data. In this paper, we propose a method that generates 3D instance masks for novel objects from RGB images guided by a 2D open-vocabulary detector. Our approach inherits the 2D detector's ability to recognize novel objects while maintaining efficient classification, enabling fast and accurate retrieval of rare instances from open-ended text queries. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/ndkhanh360/BoxOVIS.

Automatic Detection of Complex Quotation Patterns in Aggadic Literature

This paper presents ACT (Allocate Connections between Texts), a novel three-stage algorithm for the automatic detection of biblical quotations in Rabbinic literature. Unlike existing text reuse frameworks that struggle with short, paraphrased, or structurally embedded quotations, ACT combines a morphology-aware alignment algorithm with a context-sensitive enrichment stage that identifies complex citation patterns such as "Wave" and "Echo" quotations. Our approach was evaluated against leading systems, including Dicta, Passim, Text-Matcher, as well as human-annotated critical editions. We further assessed three ACT configurations to isolate the contribution of each component. Results demonstrate that the full ACT pipeline (ACT-QE) outperforms all baselines, achieving an F1 score of 0.91, with superior Recall (0.89) and Precision (0.94). Notably, ACT-2, which lacks stylistic enrichment, achieves higher Recall (0.90) but suffers in Precision, while ACT-3, using longer n-grams, offers a tradeoff between coverage and specificity. In addition to improving quotation detection, ACT's ability to classify stylistic patterns across corpora opens new avenues for genre classification and intertextual analysis. This work contributes to digital humanities and computational philology by addressing the methodological gap between exhaustive machine-based detection and human editorial judgment. ACT lays a foundation for broader applications in historical textual analysis, especially in morphologically rich and citation-dense traditions like Aggadic literature.

Detection and Analysis of Sensitive and Illegal Content on the Ethereum Blockchain Using Machine Learning Techniques

Blockchain technology, lauded for its transparent and immutable nature, introduces a novel trust model. However, its decentralized structure raises concerns about potential inclusion of malicious or illegal content. This study focuses on Ethereum, presenting a data identification and restoration algorithm. Successfully recovering 175 common files, 296 images, and 91,206 texts, we employed the FastText algorithm for sentiment analysis, achieving a 0.9 accuracy after parameter tuning. Classification revealed 70,189 neutral, 5,208 positive, and 15,810 negative texts, aiding in identifying sensitive or illicit information. Leveraging the NSFWJS library, we detected seven indecent images with 100% accuracy. Our findings expose the coexistence of benign and harmful content on the Ethereum blockchain, including personal data, explicit images, divisive language, and racial discrimination. Notably, sensitive information targeted Chinese government officials. Proposing preventative measures, our study offers valuable insights for public comprehension of blockchain technology and regulatory agency guidance. The algorithms employed present innovative solutions to address blockchain data privacy and security concerns.