Beat Detection as Object Detection

Recent beat and downbeat tracking models (e.g., RNNs, TCNs, Transformers) output frame-level activations. We propose reframing this task as object detection, where beats and downbeats are modeled as temporal "objects." Adapting the FCOS detector from computer vision to 1D audio, we replace its original backbone with WaveBeat's temporal feature extractor and add a Feature Pyramid Network to capture multi-scale temporal patterns. The model predicts overlapping beat/downbeat intervals with confidence scores, followed by non-maximum suppression (NMS) to select final predictions. This NMS step serves a similar role to DBNs in traditional trackers, but is simpler and less heuristic. Evaluated on standard music datasets, our approach achieves competitive results, showing that object detection techniques can effectively model musical beats with minimal adaptation.

Structured Universal Adversarial Attacks on Object Detection for Video Sequences

Video-based object detection plays a vital role in safety-critical applications. While deep learning-based object detectors have achieved impressive performance, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, particularly those involving universal perturbations. In this work, we propose a minimally distorted universal adversarial attack tailored for video object detection, which leverages nuclear norm regularization to promote structured perturbations concentrated in the background. To optimize this formulation efficiently, we employ an adaptive, optimistic exponentiated gradient method that enhances both scalability and convergence. Our results demonstrate that the proposed attack outperforms both low-rank projected gradient descent and Frank-Wolfe based attacks in effectiveness while maintaining high stealthiness. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/jsve96/AO-Exp-Attack.

Integrated Massive Communication and Target Localization in 6G Cell-Free Networks

This paper presents an initial investigation into the combination of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and massive communication, both of which are largely regarded as key scenarios in sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. Specifically, we consider a cell-free network comprising a large number of users, multiple targets, and distributed base stations (BSs). In each time slot, a random subset of users becomes active, transmitting pilot signals that can be scattered by the targets before reaching the BSs. Unlike conventional massive random access schemes, where the primary objectives are device activity detection and channel estimation, our framework also enables target localization by leveraging the multipath propagation effects introduced by the targets. However, due to the intricate dependency between user channels and target locations, characterizing the posterior distribution required for minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimation presents significant computational challenges. To handle this problem, we propose a hybrid message passing-based framework that incorporates multiple approximations to mitigate computational complexity. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high-accuracy device activity detection, channel estimation, and target localization simultaneously, validating the feasibility of embedding localization functionality into massive communication systems for future 6G networks.

WaterFlow: Explicit Physics-Prior Rectified Flow for Underwater Saliency Mask Generation

Underwater Salient Object Detection (USOD) faces significant challenges, including underwater image quality degradation and domain gaps. Existing methods tend to ignore the physical principles of underwater imaging or simply treat degradation phenomena in underwater images as interference factors that must be eliminated, failing to fully exploit the valuable information they contain. We propose WaterFlow, a rectified flow-based framework for underwater salient object detection that innovatively incorporates underwater physical imaging information as explicit priors directly into the network training process and introduces temporal dimension modeling, significantly enhancing the model's capability for salient object identification. On the USOD10K dataset, WaterFlow achieves a 0.072 gain in S_m, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our method. The code will be published after the acceptance.

Evaluating & Reducing Deceptive Dialogue From Language Models with Multi-turn RL

Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with millions of people worldwide in applications such as customer support, education and healthcare. However, their ability to produce deceptive outputs, whether intentionally or inadvertently, poses significant safety concerns. The unpredictable nature of LLM behavior, combined with insufficient safeguards against hallucination, misinformation, and user manipulation, makes their misuse a serious, real-world risk. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which LLMs engage in deception within dialogue, and propose the belief misalignment metric to quantify deception. We evaluate deception across four distinct dialogue scenarios, using five established deception detection metrics and our proposed metric. Our findings reveal this novel deception measure correlates more closely with human judgments than any existing metrics we test. Additionally, our benchmarking of eight state-of-the-art models indicates that LLMs naturally exhibit deceptive behavior in approximately 26% of dialogue turns, even when prompted with seemingly benign objectives. When prompted to deceive, LLMs are capable of increasing deceptiveness by as much as 31% relative to baselines. Unexpectedly, models trained with RLHF, the predominant approach for ensuring the safety of widely-deployed LLMs, still exhibit deception at a rate of 43% on average. Given that deception in dialogue is a behavior that develops over an interaction history, its effective evaluation and mitigation necessitates moving beyond single-utterance analyses. We introduce a multi-turn reinforcement learning methodology to fine-tune LLMs to reduce deceptive behaviors, leading to a 77.6% reduction compared to other instruction-tuned models.

Detect Anything via Next Point Prediction

Object detection has long been dominated by traditional coordinate regression-based models, such as YOLO, DETR, and Grounding DINO. Although recent efforts have attempted to leverage MLLMs to tackle this task, they face challenges like low recall rate, duplicate predictions, coordinate misalignment, etc. In this work, we bridge this gap and propose Rex-Omni, a 3B-scale MLLM that achieves state-of-the-art object perception performance. On benchmarks like COCO and LVIS, Rex-Omni attains performance comparable to or exceeding regression-based models (e.g., DINO, Grounding DINO) in a zero-shot setting. This is enabled by three key designs: 1) Task Formulation: we use special tokens to represent quantized coordinates from 0 to 999, reducing the model's learning difficulty and improving token efficiency for coordinate prediction; 2) Data Engines: we construct multiple data engines to generate high-quality grounding, referring, and pointing data, providing semantically rich supervision for training; \3) Training Pipelines: we employ a two-stage training process, combining supervised fine-tuning on 22 million data with GRPO-based reinforcement post-training. This RL post-training leverages geometry-aware rewards to effectively bridge the discrete-to-continuous coordinate prediction gap, improve box accuracy, and mitigate undesirable behaviors like duplicate predictions that stem from the teacher-guided nature of the initial SFT stage. Beyond conventional detection, Rex-Omni's inherent language understanding enables versatile capabilities such as object referring, pointing, visual prompting, GUI grounding, spatial referring, OCR and key-pointing, all systematically evaluated on dedicated benchmarks. We believe that Rex-Omni paves the way for more versatile and language-aware visual perception systems.

Learning to Recognize Correctly Completed Procedure Steps in Egocentric Assembly Videos through Spatio-Temporal Modeling

Procedure step recognition (PSR) aims to identify all correctly completed steps and their sequential order in videos of procedural tasks. The existing state-of-the-art models rely solely on detecting assembly object states in individual video frames. By neglecting temporal features, model robustness and accuracy are limited, especially when objects are partially occluded. To overcome these limitations, we propose Spatio-Temporal Occlusion-Resilient Modeling for Procedure Step Recognition (STORM-PSR), a dual-stream framework for PSR that leverages both spatial and temporal features. The assembly state detection stream operates effectively with unobstructed views of the object, while the spatio-temporal stream captures both spatial and temporal features to recognize step completions even under partial occlusion. This stream includes a spatial encoder, pre-trained using a novel weakly supervised approach to capture meaningful spatial representations, and a transformer-based temporal encoder that learns how these spatial features relate over time. STORM-PSR is evaluated on the MECCANO and IndustReal datasets, reducing the average delay between actual and predicted assembly step completions by 11.2% and 26.1%, respectively, compared to prior methods. We demonstrate that this reduction in delay is driven by the spatio-temporal stream, which does not rely on unobstructed views of the object to infer completed steps. The code for STORM-PSR, along with the newly annotated MECCANO labels, is made publicly available at https://timschoonbeek.github.io/stormpsr .

Extracting latent representations from X-ray spectra. Classification, regression, and accretion signatures of Chandra sources

The study of X-ray spectra is crucial to understanding the physical nature of astrophysical sources. Machine learning methods can extract compact and informative representations of data from large datasets. The Chandra Source Catalog (CSC) provides a rich archive of X-ray spectral data, which remains largely underexplored in this context. This work aims to develop a compact and physically meaningful representation of Chandra X-ray spectra using deep learning. To verify that the learned representation captures relevant information, we evaluate it through classification, regression, and interpretability analyses. We use a transformer-based autoencoder to compress X-ray spectra. The input spectra, drawn from the CSC, include only high-significance detections. Astrophysical source types and physical summary statistics are compiled from external catalogs. We evaluate the learned representation in terms of spectral reconstruction accuracy, clustering performance on 8 known astrophysical source classes, and correlation with physical quantities such as hardness ratios and hydrogen column density ($N_H$). The autoencoder accurately reconstructs spectra with 8 latent variables. Clustering in the latent space yields a balanced classification accuracy of $\sim$40% across the 8 source classes, increasing to $\sim$69% when restricted to AGNs and stellar-mass compact objects exclusively. Moreover, latent features correlate with non-linear combinations of spectral fluxes, suggesting that the compressed representation encodes physically relevant information. The proposed autoencoder-based pipeline is a powerful tool for the representation and interpretation of X-ray spectra, providing a compact latent space that supports both classification and the estimation of physical properties. This work demonstrates the potential of deep learning for spectral studies and uncovering new patterns in X-ray data.

DeePAQ: A Perceptual Audio Quality Metric Based On Foundational Models and Weakly Supervised Learning

This paper presents the Deep learning-based Perceptual Audio Quality metric (DeePAQ) for evaluating general audio quality. Our approach leverages metric learning together with the music foundation model MERT, guided by surrogate labels, to construct an embedding space that captures distortion intensity in general audio. To the best of our knowledge, DeePAQ is the first in the general audio quality domain to leverage weakly supervised labels and metric learning for fine-tuning a music foundation model with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a direction not yet explored by other state-of-the-art methods. We benchmark the proposed model against state-of-the-art objective audio quality metrics across listening tests spanning audio coding and source separation. Results show that our method surpasses existing metrics in detecting coding artifacts and generalizes well to unseen distortions such as source separation, highlighting its robustness and versatility.

Aixel: A Unified, Adaptive and Extensible System for AI-powered Data Analysis

A growing trend in modern data analysis is the integration of data management with learning, guided by accuracy, latency, and cost requirements. In practice, applications draw data of different formats from many sources. In the meanwhile, the objectives and budgets change over time. Existing systems handle these applications across databases, analysis libraries, and tuning services. Such fragmentation leads to complex user interaction, limited adaptability, suboptimal performance, and poor extensibility across components. To address these challenges, we present Aixel, a unified, adaptive, and extensible system for AI-powered data analysis. The system organizes work across four layers: application, task, model, and data. The task layer provides a declarative interface to capture user intent, which is parsed into an executable operator plan. An optimizer compiles and schedules this plan to meet specified goals in accuracy, latency, and cost. The task layer coordinates the execution of data and model operators, with built-in support for reuse and caching to improve efficiency. The model layer offers versioned storage for index, metadata, tensors, and model artifacts. It supports adaptive construction, task-aligned drift detection, and safe updates that reuse shared components. The data layer provides unified data management capabilities, including indexing, constraint-aware discovery, task-aligned selection, and comprehensive feature management. With the above designed layers, Aixel delivers a user friendly, adaptive, efficient, and extensible system.