Digital Twin-Assisted Measurement Design and Channel Statistics Prediction

Prediction of wireless channels and their statistics is a fundamental procedure for ensuring performance guarantees in wireless systems. Statistical radio maps powered by Gaussian processes (GPs) offer flexible, non-parametric frameworks, but their performance depends critically on the choice of mean and covariance functions. These are typically learned from dense measurements without exploiting environmental geometry. Digital twins (DTs) of wireless environments leverage computational power to incorporate geometric information; however, they require costly calibration to accurately capture material and propagation characteristics. This work introduces a hybrid channel prediction framework that leverages uncalibrated DTs derived from open-source maps to extract geometry-induced prior information for GP prediction. These structural priors are fused with a small number of channel measurements, enabling data-efficient prediction of channel statistics across the entire environment. By exploiting the uncertainty quantification inherent to GPs, the framework supports principled measurement selection by identifying informative probing locations under resource constraints. Through this integration of imperfect DTs with statistical learning, the proposed method reduces measurement overhead, improves prediction accuracy, and establishes a practical approach for resource-efficient wireless channel prediction.

RS-SSM: Refining Forgotten Specifics in State Space Model for Video Semantic Segmentation

Recently, state space models have demonstrated efficient video segmentation through linear-complexity state space compression. However, Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS) requires pixel-level spatiotemporal modeling capabilities to maintain temporal consistency in segmentation of semantic objects. While state space models can preserve common semantic information during state space compression, the fixed-size state space inevitably forgets specific information, which limits the models' capability for pixel-level segmentation. To tackle the above issue, we proposed a Refining Specifics State Space Model approach (RS-SSM) for video semantic segmentation, which performs complementary refining of forgotten spatiotemporal specifics. Specifically, a Channel-wise Amplitude Perceptron (CwAP) is designed to extract and align the distribution characteristics of specific information in the state space. Besides, a Forgetting Gate Information Refiner (FGIR) is proposed to adaptively invert and refine the forgetting gate matrix in the state space model based on the specific information distribution. Consequently, our RS-SSM leverages the inverted forgetting gate to complementarily refine the specific information forgotten during state space compression, thereby enhancing the model's capability for spatiotemporal pixel-level segmentation. Extensive experiments on four VSS benchmarks demonstrate that our RS-SSM achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/CVPR2026-RS-SSM.

Forecasting with Guidance: Representation-Level Supervision for Time Series Forecasting

Nowadays, time series forecasting is predominantly approached through the end-to-end training of deep learning architectures using error-based objectives. While this is effective at minimizing average loss, it encourages the encoder to discard informative yet extreme patterns. This results in smooth predictions and temporal representations that poorly capture salient dynamics. To address this issue, we propose ReGuider, a plug-in method that can be seamlessly integrated into any forecasting architecture. ReGuider leverages pretrained time series foundation models as semantic teachers. During training, the input sequence is processed together by the target forecasting model and the pretrained model. Rather than using the pretrained model's outputs directly, we extract its intermediate embeddings, which are rich in temporal and semantic information, and align them with the target model's encoder embeddings through representation-level supervision. This alignment process enables the encoder to learn more expressive temporal representations, thereby improving the accuracy of downstream forecasting. Extensive experimentation across diverse datasets and architectures demonstrates that our ReGuider consistently improves forecasting performance, confirming its effectiveness and versatility.

DSO: Dual-Scale Neural Operators for Stable Long-term Fluid Dynamics Forecasting

Long-term fluid dynamics forecasting is a critically important problem in science and engineering. While neural operators have emerged as a promising paradigm for modeling systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), they often struggle with long-term stability and precision. We identify two fundamental failure modes in existing architectures: (1) local detail blurring, where fine-scale structures such as vortex cores and sharp gradients are progressively smoothed, and (2) global trend deviation, where the overall motion trajectory drifts from the ground truth during extended rollouts. We argue that these failures arise because existing neural operators treat local and global information processing uniformly, despite their inherently different evolution characteristics in physical systems. To bridge this gap, we propose the Dual-Scale Neural Operator (DSO), which explicitly decouples information processing into two complementary modules: depthwise separable convolutions for fine-grained local feature extraction and an MLP-Mixer for long-range global aggregation. Through numerical experiments on vortex dynamics, we demonstrate that nearby perturbations primarily affect local vortex structure while distant perturbations influence global motion trends, providing empirical validation for our design choice. Extensive experiments on turbulent flow benchmarks show that DSO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while maintaining robust long-term stability, reducing prediction error by over 88% compared to existing neural operators.

Can pre-trained Deep Learning models predict groove ratings?

This study explores the extent to which deep learning models can predict groove and its related perceptual dimensions directly from audio signals. We critically examine the effectiveness of seven state-of-the-art deep learning models in predicting groove ratings and responses to groove-related queries through the extraction of audio embeddings. Additionally, we compare these predictions with traditional handcrafted audio features. To better understand the underlying mechanics, we extend this methodology to analyze predictions based on source-separated instruments, thereby isolating the contributions of individual musical elements. Our analysis reveals a clear separation of groove characteristics driven by the underlying musical style of the tracks (funk, pop, and rock). These findings indicate that deep audio representations can successfully encode complex, style-dependent groove components that traditional features often miss. Ultimately, this work highlights the capacity of advanced deep learning models to capture the multifaceted concept of groove, demonstrating the strong potential of representation learning to advance predictive Music Information Retrieval methodologies.

Object Search in Partially-Known Environments via LLM-informed Model-based Planning and Prompt Selection

We present a novel LLM-informed model-based planning framework, and a novel prompt selection method, for object search in partially-known environments. Our approach uses an LLM to estimate statistics about the likelihood of finding the target object when searching various locations throughout the scene that, combined with travel costs extracted from the environment map, are used to instantiate a model, thus using the LLM to inform planning and achieve effective search performance. Moreover, the abstraction upon which our approach relies is amenable to deployment-time model selection via the recent offline replay approach, an insight we leverage to enable fast prompt and LLM selection during deployment. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our LLM-informed model-based planning approach outperforms the baseline planning strategy that fully relies on LLM and optimistic strategy with as much as 11.8% and 39.2% improvements respectively, and our bandit-like selection approach enables quick selection of best prompts and LLMs resulting in 6.5% lower average cost and 33.8% lower average cumulative regret over baseline UCB bandit selection. Real-robot experiments in an apartment demonstrate similar improvements and so further validate our approach.

SPECTRA: An Efficient Spectral-Informed Neural Network for Sensor-Based Activity Recognition

Real time sensor based applications in pervasive computing require edge deployable models to ensure low latency privacy and efficient interaction. A prime example is sensor based human activity recognition where models must balance accuracy with stringent resource constraints. Yet many deep learning approaches treat temporal sensor signals as black box sequences overlooking spectral temporal structure while demanding excessive computation. We present SPECTRA a deployment first co designed spectral temporal architecture that integrates short time Fourier transform STFT feature extraction depthwise separable convolutions and channel wise self attention to capture spectral temporal dependencies under real edge runtime and memory constraints. A compact bidirectional GRU with attention pooling summarizes within window dynamics at low cost reducing downstream model burden while preserving accuracy. Across five public HAR datasets SPECTRA matches or approaches larger CNN LSTM and Transformer baselines while substantially reducing parameters latency and energy. Deployments on a Google Pixel 9 smartphone and an STM32L4 microcontroller further demonstrate end to end deployable realtime private and efficient HAR.

CoCR-RAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Web Q&A via Concept-oriented Context Reconstruction

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has shown promising results in enhancing Q&A by incorporating information from the web and other external sources. However, the supporting documents retrieved from the heterogeneous web often originate from multiple sources with diverse writing styles, varying formats, and inconsistent granularity. Fusing such multi-source documents into a coherent and knowledge-intensive context remains a significant challenge, as the presence of irrelevant and redundant information can compromise the factual consistency of the inferred answers. This paper proposes the Concept-oriented Context Reconstruction RAG (CoCR-RAG), a framework that addresses the multi-source information fusion problem in RAG through linguistically grounded concept-level integration. Specifically, we introduce a concept distillation algorithm that extracts essential concepts from Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a stable semantic representation that structures the meaning of texts as logical graphs. The distilled concepts from multiple retrieved documents are then fused and reconstructed into a unified, information-intensive context by Large Language Models, which supplement only the necessary sentence elements to highlight the core knowledge. Experiments on the PopQA and EntityQuestions datasets demonstrate that CoCR-RAG significantly outperforms existing context-reconstruction methods across these Web Q&A benchmarks. Furthermore, CoCR-RAG shows robustness across various backbone LLMs, establishing itself as a flexible, plug-and-play component adaptable to different RAG frameworks.

GUIDED: Granular Understanding via Identification, Detection, and Discrimination for Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Fine-grained open-vocabulary object detection (FG-OVD) aims to detect novel object categories described by attribute-rich texts. While existing open-vocabulary detectors show promise at the base-category level, they underperform in fine-grained settings due to the semantic entanglement of subjects and attributes in pretrained vision-language model (VLM) embeddings -- leading to over-representation of attributes, mislocalization, and semantic drift in embedding space. We propose GUIDED, a decomposition framework specifically designed to address the semantic entanglement between subjects and attributes in fine-grained prompts. By separating object localization and fine-grained recognition into distinct pathways, HUIDED aligns each subtask with the module best suited for its respective roles. Specifically, given a fine-grained class name, we first use a language model to extract a coarse-grained subject and its descriptive attributes. Then the detector is guided solely by the subject embedding, ensuring stable localization unaffected by irrelevant or overrepresented attributes. To selectively retain helpful attributes, we introduce an attribute embedding fusion module that incorporates attribute information into detection queries in an attention-based manner. This mitigates over-representation while preserving discriminative power. Finally, a region-level attribute discrimination module compares each detected region against full fine-grained class names using a refined vision-language model with a projection head for improved alignment. Extensive experiments on FG-OVD and 3F-OVD benchmarks show that GUIDED achieves new state-of-the-art results, demonstrating the benefits of disentangled modeling and modular optimization. Our code will be released at https://github.com/lijm48/GUIDED.

Interpretable long-term traffic modelling on national road networks using theory-informed deep learning

Long-term traffic modelling is fundamental to transport planning, but existing approaches often trade off interpretability, transferability, and predictive accuracy. Classical travel demand models provide behavioural structure but rely on strong assumptions and extensive calibration, whereas generic deep learning models capture complex patterns but often lack theoretical grounding and spatial transferability, limiting their usefulness for long-term planning applications. We propose DeepDemand, a theory-informed deep learning framework that embeds key components of travel demand theory to predict long-term highway traffic volumes using external socioeconomic features and road-network structure. The framework integrates a competitive two-source Dijkstra procedure for local origin-destination (OD) region extraction and OD pair screening with a differentiable architecture modelling OD interactions and travel-time deterrence. The model is evaluated using eight years (2017-2024) of observations on the UK strategic road network, covering 5088 highway segments. Under random cross-validation, DeepDemand achieves an R2 of 0.718 and an MAE of 7406 vehicles, outperforming linear, ridge, random forest, and gravity-style baselines. Performance remains strong under spatial cross-validation (R2 = 0.665), indicating good geographic transferability. Interpretability analysis reveals a stable nonlinear travel-time deterrence pattern, key socioeconomic drivers of demand, and polycentric OD interaction structures aligned with major employment centres and transport hubs. These results highlight the value of integrating transport theory with deep learning for interpretable highway traffic modelling and practical planning applications.