Curse of Slicing: Why Sliced Mutual Information is a Deceptive Measure of Statistical Dependence

Sliced Mutual Information (SMI) is widely used as a scalable alternative to mutual information for measuring non-linear statistical dependence. Despite its advantages, such as faster convergence, robustness to high dimensionality, and nullification only under statistical independence, we demonstrate that SMI is highly susceptible to data manipulation and exhibits counterintuitive behavior. Through extensive benchmarking and theoretical analysis, we show that SMI saturates easily, fails to detect increases in statistical dependence (even under linear transformations designed to enhance the extraction of information), prioritizes redundancy over informative content, and in some cases, performs worse than simpler dependence measures like the correlation coefficient.

MedMoE: Modality-Specialized Mixture of Experts for Medical Vision-Language Understanding

Different medical imaging modalities capture diagnostic information at varying spatial resolutions, from coarse global patterns to fine-grained localized structures. However, most existing vision-language frameworks in the medical domain apply a uniform strategy for local feature extraction, overlooking the modality-specific demands. In this work, we present MedMoE, a modular and extensible vision-language processing framework that dynamically adapts visual representation based on the diagnostic context. MedMoE incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module conditioned on the report type, which routes multi-scale image features through specialized expert branches trained to capture modality-specific visual semantics. These experts operate over feature pyramids derived from a Swin Transformer backbone, enabling spatially adaptive attention to clinically relevant regions. This framework produces localized visual representations aligned with textual descriptions, without requiring modality-specific supervision at inference. Empirical results on diverse medical benchmarks demonstrate that MedMoE improves alignment and retrieval performance across imaging modalities, underscoring the value of modality-specialized visual representations in clinical vision-language systems.

RETENTION: Resource-Efficient Tree-Based Ensemble Model Acceleration with Content-Addressable Memory

Although deep learning has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in learning from unstructured data, modern tree-based ensemble models remain superior in extracting relevant information and learning from structured datasets. While several efforts have been made to accelerate tree-based models, the inherent characteristics of the models pose significant challenges for conventional accelerators. Recent research leveraging content-addressable memory (CAM) offers a promising solution for accelerating tree-based models, yet existing designs suffer from excessive memory consumption and low utilization. This work addresses these challenges by introducing RETENTION, an end-to-end framework that significantly reduces CAM capacity requirement for tree-based model inference. We propose an iterative pruning algorithm with a novel pruning criterion tailored for bagging-based models (e.g., Random Forest), which minimizes model complexity while ensuring controlled accuracy degradation. Additionally, we present a tree mapping scheme that incorporates two innovative data placement strategies to alleviate the memory redundancy caused by the widespread use of don't care states in CAM. Experimental results show that implementing the tree mapping scheme alone achieves $1.46\times$ to $21.30 \times$ better space efficiency, while the full RETENTION framework yields $4.35\times$ to $207.12\times$ improvement with less than 3% accuracy loss. These results demonstrate that RETENTION is highly effective in reducing CAM capacity requirement, providing a resource-efficient direction for tree-based model acceleration.

Multimodal Tabular Reasoning with Privileged Structured Information

Tabular reasoning involves multi-step information extraction and logical inference over tabular data. While recent advances have leveraged large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over structured tables, such high-quality textual representations are often unavailable in real-world settings, where tables typically appear as images. In this paper, we tackle the task of tabular reasoning from table images, leveraging privileged structured information available during training to enhance multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The key challenges lie in the complexity of accurately aligning structured information with visual representations, and in effectively transferring structured reasoning skills to MLLMs despite the input modality gap. To address these, we introduce TabUlar Reasoning with Bridged infOrmation ({\sc Turbo}), a new framework for multimodal tabular reasoning with privileged structured tables. {\sc Turbo} benefits from a structure-aware reasoning trace generator based on DeepSeek-R1, contributing to high-quality modality-bridged data. On this basis, {\sc Turbo} repeatedly generates and selects the advantageous reasoning paths, further enhancing the model's tabular reasoning ability. Experimental results demonstrate that, with limited ($9$k) data, {\sc Turbo} achieves state-of-the-art performance ($+7.2\%$ vs. previous SOTA) across multiple datasets.

Reliable Reasoning Path: Distilling Effective Guidance for LLM Reasoning with Knowledge Graphs

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks due to a lack of background knowledge and a tendency to hallucinate. To address these limitations, integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) with LLMs has been intensively studied. Existing KG-enhanced LLMs focus on supplementary factual knowledge, but still struggle with solving complex questions. We argue that refining the relationships among facts and organizing them into a logically consistent reasoning path is equally important as factual knowledge itself. Despite their potential, extracting reliable reasoning paths from KGs poses the following challenges: the complexity of graph structures and the existence of multiple generated paths, making it difficult to distinguish between useful and redundant ones. To tackle these challenges, we propose the RRP framework to mine the knowledge graph, which combines the semantic strengths of LLMs with structural information obtained through relation embedding and bidirectional distribution learning. Additionally, we introduce a rethinking module that evaluates and refines reasoning paths according to their significance. Experimental results on two public datasets show that RRP achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing baseline methods. Moreover, RRP can be easily integrated into various LLMs to enhance their reasoning abilities in a plug-and-play manner. By generating high-quality reasoning paths tailored to specific questions, RRP distills effective guidance for LLM reasoning.

LGM-Pose: A Lightweight Global Modeling Network for Real-time Human Pose Estimation

Most of the current top-down multi-person pose estimation lightweight methods are based on multi-branch parallel pure CNN network architecture, which often struggle to capture the global context required for detecting semantically complex keypoints and are hindered by high latency due to their intricate and redundant structures. In this article, an approximate single-branch lightweight global modeling network (LGM-Pose) is proposed to address these challenges. In the network, a lightweight MobileViM Block is designed with a proposed Lightweight Attentional Representation Module (LARM), which integrates information within and between patches using the Non-Parametric Transformation Operation(NPT-Op) to extract global information. Additionally, a novel Shuffle-Integrated Fusion Module (SFusion) is introduced to effectively integrate multi-scale information, mitigating performance degradation often observed in single-branch structures. Experimental evaluations on the COCO and MPII datasets demonstrate that our approach not only reduces the number of parameters compared to existing mainstream lightweight methods but also achieves superior performance and faster processing speeds.

A Novel Lightweight Transformer with Edge-Aware Fusion for Remote Sensing Image Captioning

Transformer-based models have achieved strong performance in remote sensing image captioning by capturing long-range dependencies and contextual information. However, their practical deployment is hindered by high computational costs, especially in multi-modal frameworks that employ separate transformer-based encoders and decoders. In addition, existing remote sensing image captioning models primarily focus on high-level semantic extraction while often overlooking fine-grained structural features such as edges, contours, and object boundaries. To address these challenges, a lightweight transformer architecture is proposed by reducing the dimensionality of the encoder layers and employing a distilled version of GPT-2 as the decoder. A knowledge distillation strategy is used to transfer knowledge from a more complex teacher model to improve the performance of the lightweight network. Furthermore, an edge-aware enhancement strategy is incorporated to enhance image representation and object boundary understanding, enabling the model to capture fine-grained spatial details in remote sensing images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves caption quality compared to state-of-the-art methods.

HomographyAD: Deep Anomaly Detection Using Self Homography Learning

Anomaly detection (AD) is a task that distinguishes normal and abnormal data, which is important for applying automation technologies of the manufacturing facilities. For MVTec dataset that is a representative AD dataset for industrial environment, many recent works have shown remarkable performances. However, the existing anomaly detection works have a limitation of showing good performance for fully-aligned datasets only, unlike real-world industrial environments. To solve this limitation, we propose HomographyAD, a novel deep anomaly detection methodology based on the ImageNet-pretrained network, which is specially designed for actual industrial dataset. Specifically, we first suggest input foreground alignment using the deep homography estimation method. In addition, we fine-tune the model by self homography learning to learn additional shape information from normal samples. Finally, we conduct anomaly detection based on the measure of how far the feature of test sample is from the distribution of the extracted normal features. By applying our proposed method to various existing AD approaches, we show performance enhancement through extensive experiments.

Evidential Deep Learning with Spectral-Spatial Uncertainty Disentanglement for Open-Set Hyperspectral Domain Generalization

Open-set domain generalization(OSDG) for hyperspectral image classification presents significant challenges due to the presence of unknown classes in target domains and the need for models to generalize across multiple unseen domains without target-specific adaptation. Existing domain adaptation methods assume access to target domain data during training and fail to address the fundamental issue of domain shift when unknown classes are present, leading to negative transfer and reduced classification performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel open-set domain generalization framework that combines four key components: Spectrum-Invariant Frequency Disentanglement (SIFD) for domain-agnostic feature extraction, Dual-Channel Residual Network (DCRN) for robust spectral-spatial feature learning, Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) for uncertainty quantification, and Spectral-Spatial Uncertainty Disentanglement (SSUD) for reliable open-set classification. The SIFD module extracts domain-invariant spectral features in the frequency domain through attention-weighted frequency analysis and domain-agnostic regularization, while DCRN captures complementary spectral and spatial information via parallel pathways with adaptive fusion. EDL provides principled uncertainty estimation using Dirichlet distributions, enabling the SSUD module to make reliable open-set decisions through uncertainty-aware pathway weighting and adaptive rejection thresholding. Experimental results on three cross-scene hyperspectral classification tasks show that our approach achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods while requiring no access to the target domain during training. The implementation will be made available at https://github.com/amir-khb/SSUDOSDG upon acceptance.

Structure-Aware Radar-Camera Depth Estimation

Monocular depth estimation aims to determine the depth of each pixel from an RGB image captured by a monocular camera. The development of deep learning has significantly advanced this field by facilitating the learning of depth features from some well-annotated datasets \cite{Geiger_Lenz_Stiller_Urtasun_2013,silberman2012indoor}. Eigen \textit{et al.} \cite{eigen2014depth} first introduce a multi-scale fusion network for depth regression. Following this, subsequent improvements have come from reinterpreting the regression task as a classification problem \cite{bhat2021adabins,Li_Wang_Liu_Jiang_2022}, incorporating additional priors \cite{shao2023nddepth,yang2023gedepth}, and developing more effective objective function \cite{xian2020structure,Yin_Liu_Shen_Yan_2019}. Despite these advances, generalizing to unseen domains remains a challenge. Recently, several methods have employed affine-invariant loss to enable multi-dataset joint training \cite{MiDaS,ZeroDepth,guizilini2023towards,Dany}. Among them, Depth Anything \cite{Dany} has shown leading performance in zero-shot monocular depth estimation. While it struggles to estimate accurate metric depth due to the lack of explicit depth cues, it excels at extracting structural information from unseen images, producing structure-detailed monocular depth.