Semantic Channel Equalization Strategies for Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding

Deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for end-to-end semantic communications, jointly learning to compress and protect task-relevant features over noisy channels. However, existing DeepJSCC schemes assume a shared latent space at transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) - an assumption that fails in multi-vendor deployments where encoders and decoders cannot be co-trained. This mismatch introduces "semantic noise", degrading reconstruction quality and downstream task performance. In this paper, we systematize and evaluate methods for semantic channel equalization for DeepJSCC, introducing an additional processing stage that aligns heterogeneous latent spaces under both physical and semantic impairments. We investigate three classes of aligners: (i) linear maps, which admit closed-form solutions; (ii) lightweight neural networks, offering greater expressiveness; and (iii) a Parseval-frame equalizer, which operates in zero-shot mode without the need for training. Through extensive experiments on image reconstruction over AWGN and fading channels, we quantify trade-offs among complexity, data efficiency, and fidelity, providing guidelines for deploying DeepJSCC in heterogeneous AI-native wireless networks.

HyperVLA: Efficient Inference in Vision-Language-Action Models via Hypernetworks

Built upon language and vision foundation models with strong generalization ability and trained on large-scale robotic data, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising approach to learning generalist robotic policies. However, a key drawback of existing VLAs is their extremely high inference costs. In this paper, we propose HyperVLA to address this problem. Unlike existing monolithic VLAs that activate the whole model during both training and inference, HyperVLA uses a novel hypernetwork (HN)-based architecture that activates only a small task-specific policy during inference, while still retaining the high model capacity needed to accommodate diverse multi-task behaviors during training. Successfully training an HN-based VLA is nontrivial so HyperVLA contains several key algorithm design features that improve its performance, including properly utilizing the prior knowledge from existing vision foundation models, HN normalization, and an action generation strategy. Compared to monolithic VLAs, HyperVLA achieves a similar or even higher success rate for both zero-shot generalization and few-shot adaptation, while significantly reducing inference costs. Compared to OpenVLA, a state-of-the-art VLA model, HyperVLA reduces the number of activated parameters at test time by $90\times$, and accelerates inference speed by $120\times$. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/MasterXiong/HyperVLA

Foundation Visual Encoders Are Secretly Few-Shot Anomaly Detectors

Few-shot anomaly detection streamlines and simplifies industrial safety inspection. However, limited samples make accurate differentiation between normal and abnormal features challenging, and even more so under category-agnostic conditions. Large-scale pre-training of foundation visual encoders has advanced many fields, as the enormous quantity of data helps to learn the general distribution of normal images. We observe that the anomaly amount in an image directly correlates with the difference in the learnt embeddings and utilize this to design a few-shot anomaly detector termed FoundAD. This is done by learning a nonlinear projection operator onto the natural image manifold. The simple operator acts as an effective tool for anomaly detection to characterize and identify out-of-distribution regions in an image. Extensive experiments show that our approach supports multi-class detection and achieves competitive performance while using substantially fewer parameters than prior methods. Backed up by evaluations with multiple foundation encoders, including fresh DINOv3, we believe this idea broadens the perspective on foundation features and advances the field of few-shot anomaly detection.

Continual Personalization for Diffusion Models

Updating diffusion models in an incremental setting would be practical in real-world applications yet computationally challenging. We present a novel learning strategy of Concept Neuron Selection (CNS), a simple yet effective approach to perform personalization in a continual learning scheme. CNS uniquely identifies neurons in diffusion models that are closely related to the target concepts. In order to mitigate catastrophic forgetting problems while preserving zero-shot text-to-image generation ability, CNS finetunes concept neurons in an incremental manner and jointly preserves knowledge learned of previous concepts. Evaluation of real-world datasets demonstrates that CNS achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal parameter adjustments, outperforming previous methods in both single and multi-concept personalization works. CNS also achieves fusion-free operation, reducing memory storage and processing time for continual personalization.

Agent Fine-tuning through Distillation for Domain-specific LLMs in Microdomains

Agentic large language models (LLMs) have become prominent for autonomously interacting with external environments and performing multi-step reasoning tasks. Most approaches leverage these capabilities via in-context learning with few-shot prompts, but this often results in lengthy inputs and higher computational costs. Agent fine-tuning offers an alternative by enabling LLMs to internalize procedural reasoning and domain-specific knowledge through training on relevant data and demonstration trajectories. While prior studies have focused on general domains, their effectiveness in specialized technical microdomains remains unclear. This paper explores agent fine-tuning for domain adaptation within Hitachi's JP1 middleware, a microdomain for specialized IT operations. We fine-tuned LLMs using JP1-specific datasets derived from domain manuals and distilled reasoning trajectories generated by LLMs themselves, enhancing decision making accuracy and search efficiency. During inference, we used an agentic prompt with retrieval-augmented generation and introduced a context-answer extractor to improve information relevance. On JP1 certification exam questions, our method achieved a 14% performance improvement over the base model, demonstrating the potential of agent fine-tuning for domain-specific reasoning in complex microdomains.

SLAP: Learning Speaker and Health-Related Representations from Natural Language Supervision

Speech encodes paralinguistic information such as demographics, voice quality, and health. Yet no audio foundation model supports zero-shot or out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to these tasks. We introduce SLAP (Speaker contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining), the first model aligning speech with natural language descriptions of speaker and health metadata through contrastive learning. SLAP combines a Vision Transformer audio encoder with text encoders, trained on more than 3400 hours across 9 datasets with diverse speaker annotations. We evaluated on 38 binary classification tasks spanning demographics, voice characteristics, and clinical assessments across 14 datasets in 7 languages. SLAP achieves 62.9% average F1 in zero-shot evaluation, a 48% relative improvement over CLAP (42.4%), while demonstrating strong OOD generalization to unseen languages and clinical populations. When fine-tuned with linear probing, SLAP reaches 69.3% F1 overall and achieves best-in-class performance on health tasks (57.9% F1), surpassing larger foundation models.

MPMAvatar: Learning 3D Gaussian Avatars with Accurate and Robust Physics-Based Dynamics

While there has been significant progress in the field of 3D avatar creation from visual observations, modeling physically plausible dynamics of humans with loose garments remains a challenging problem. Although a few existing works address this problem by leveraging physical simulation, they suffer from limited accuracy or robustness to novel animation inputs. In this work, we present MPMAvatar, a framework for creating 3D human avatars from multi-view videos that supports highly realistic, robust animation, as well as photorealistic rendering from free viewpoints. For accurate and robust dynamics modeling, our key idea is to use a Material Point Method-based simulator, which we carefully tailor to model garments with complex deformations and contact with the underlying body by incorporating an anisotropic constitutive model and a novel collision handling algorithm. We combine this dynamics modeling scheme with our canonical avatar that can be rendered using 3D Gaussian Splatting with quasi-shadowing, enabling high-fidelity rendering for physically realistic animations. In our experiments, we demonstrate that MPMAvatar significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art physics-based avatar in terms of (1) dynamics modeling accuracy, (2) rendering accuracy, and (3) robustness and efficiency. Additionally, we present a novel application in which our avatar generalizes to unseen interactions in a zero-shot manner-which was not achievable with previous learning-based methods due to their limited simulation generalizability. Our project page is at: https://KAISTChangmin.github.io/MPMAvatar/

ReTabAD: A Benchmark for Restoring Semantic Context in Tabular Anomaly Detection

In tabular anomaly detection (AD), textual semantics often carry critical signals, as the definition of an anomaly is closely tied to domain-specific context. However, existing benchmarks provide only raw data points without semantic context, overlooking rich textual metadata such as feature descriptions and domain knowledge that experts rely on in practice. This limitation restricts research flexibility and prevents models from fully leveraging domain knowledge for detection. ReTabAD addresses this gap by restoring textual semantics to enable context-aware tabular AD research. We provide (1) 20 carefully curated tabular datasets enriched with structured textual metadata, together with implementations of state-of-the-art AD algorithms including classical, deep learning, and LLM-based approaches, and (2) a zero-shot LLM framework that leverages semantic context without task-specific training, establishing a strong baseline for future research. Furthermore, this work provides insights into the role and utility of textual metadata in AD through experiments and analysis. Results show that semantic context improves detection performance and enhances interpretability by supporting domain-aware reasoning. These findings establish ReTabAD as a benchmark for systematic exploration of context-aware AD.

Are LLMs Better GNN Helpers? Rethinking Robust Graph Learning under Deficiencies with Iterative Refinement

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely adopted in Web-related applications, serving as a core technique for learning from graph-structured data, such as text-attributed graphs. Yet in real-world scenarios, such graphs exhibit deficiencies that substantially undermine GNN performance. While prior GNN-based augmentation studies have explored robustness against individual imperfections, a systematic understanding of how graph-native and Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced methods behave under compound deficiencies is still missing. Specifically, there has been no comprehensive investigation comparing conventional approaches and recent LLM-on-graph frameworks, leaving their merits unclear. To fill this gap, we conduct the first empirical study that benchmarks these two lines of methods across diverse graph deficiencies, revealing overlooked vulnerabilities and challenging the assumption that LLM augmentation is consistently superior. Building on empirical findings, we propose Robust Graph Learning via Retrieval-Augmented Contrastive Refinement (RoGRAD) framework. Unlike prior one-shot LLM-as-Enhancer designs, RoGRAD is the first iterative paradigm that leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to inject retrieval-grounded augmentations by supplying class-consistent, diverse augmentations and enforcing discriminative representations through iterative graph contrastive learning. It transforms LLM augmentation for graphs from static signal injection into dynamic refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate RoGRAD's superiority over both conventional GNN- and LLM-enhanced baselines, achieving up to 82.43% average improvement.

Flock: A Knowledge Graph Foundation Model via Learning on Random Walks

We study the problem of zero-shot link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs), which requires models to generalize over novel entities and novel relations. Knowledge graph foundation models (KGFMs) address this task by enforcing equivariance over both nodes and relations, learning from structural properties of nodes and relations, which are then transferable to novel graphs with similar structural properties. However, the conventional notion of deterministic equivariance imposes inherent limits on the expressive power of KGFMs, preventing them from distinguishing structurally similar but semantically distinct relations. To overcome this limitation, we introduce probabilistic node-relation equivariance, which preserves equivariance in distribution while incorporating a principled randomization to break symmetries during inference. Building on this principle, we present Flock, a KGFM that iteratively samples random walks, encodes them into sequences via a recording protocol, embeds them with a sequence model, and aggregates representations of nodes and relations via learned pooling. Crucially, Flock respects probabilistic node-relation equivariance and is a universal approximator for isomorphism-invariant link-level functions over KGs. Empirically, Flock perfectly solves our new diagnostic dataset Petals where current KGFMs fail, and achieves state-of-the-art performances on entity- and relation prediction tasks on 54 KGs from diverse domains.