E-SAM: Training-Free Segment Every Entity Model

Entity Segmentation (ES) aims at identifying and segmenting distinct entities within an image without the need for predefined class labels. This characteristic makes ES well-suited to open-world applications with adaptation to diverse and dynamically changing environments, where new and previously unseen entities may appear frequently. Existing ES methods either require large annotated datasets or high training costs, limiting their scalability and adaptability. Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), especially in its Automatic Mask Generation (AMG) mode, has shown potential for holistic image segmentation. However, it struggles with over-segmentation and under-segmentation, making it less effective for ES. In this paper, we introduce E-SAM, a novel training-free framework that exhibits exceptional ES capability. Specifically, we first propose Multi-level Mask Generation (MMG) that hierarchically processes SAM's AMG outputs to generate reliable object-level masks while preserving fine details at other levels. Entity-level Mask Refinement (EMR) then refines these object-level masks into accurate entity-level masks. That is, it separates overlapping masks to address the redundancy issues inherent in SAM's outputs and merges similar masks by evaluating entity-level consistency. Lastly, Under-Segmentation Refinement (USR) addresses under-segmentation by generating additional high-confidence masks fused with EMR outputs to produce the final ES map. These three modules are seamlessly optimized to achieve the best ES without additional training overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that E-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to prior ES methods, demonstrating a significant improvement by +30.1 on benchmark metrics.

HumanoidPano: Hybrid Spherical Panoramic-LiDAR Cross-Modal Perception for Humanoid Robots

The perceptual system design for humanoid robots poses unique challenges due to inherent structural constraints that cause severe self-occlusion and limited field-of-view (FOV). We present HumanoidPano, a novel hybrid cross-modal perception framework that synergistically integrates panoramic vision and LiDAR sensing to overcome these limitations. Unlike conventional robot perception systems that rely on monocular cameras or standard multi-sensor configurations, our method establishes geometrically-aware modality alignment through a spherical vision transformer, enabling seamless fusion of 360 visual context with LiDAR's precise depth measurements. First, Spherical Geometry-aware Constraints (SGC) leverage panoramic camera ray properties to guide distortion-regularized sampling offsets for geometric alignment. Second, Spatial Deformable Attention (SDA) aggregates hierarchical 3D features via spherical offsets, enabling efficient 360{\deg}-to-BEV fusion with geometrically complete object representations. Third, Panoramic Augmentation (AUG) combines cross-view transformations and semantic alignment to enhance BEV-panoramic feature consistency during data augmentation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the 360BEV-Matterport benchmark. Real-world deployment on humanoid platforms validates the system's capability to generate accurate BEV segmentation maps through panoramic-LiDAR co-perception, directly enabling downstream navigation tasks in complex environments. Our work establishes a new paradigm for embodied perception in humanoid robotics.

Ev-Layout: A Large-scale Event-based Multi-modal Dataset for Indoor Layout Estimation and Tracking

This paper presents Ev-Layout, a novel large-scale event-based multi-modal dataset designed for indoor layout estimation and tracking. Ev-Layout makes key contributions to the community by: Utilizing a hybrid data collection platform (with a head-mounted display and VR interface) that integrates both RGB and bio-inspired event cameras to capture indoor layouts in motion. Incorporating time-series data from inertial measurement units (IMUs) and ambient lighting conditions recorded during data collection to highlight the potential impact of motion speed and lighting on layout estimation accuracy. The dataset consists of 2.5K sequences, including over 771.3K RGB images and 10 billion event data points. Of these, 39K images are annotated with indoor layouts, enabling research in both event-based and video-based indoor layout estimation. Based on the dataset, we propose an event-based layout estimation pipeline with a novel event-temporal distribution feature module to effectively aggregate the spatio-temporal information from events. Additionally, we introduce a spatio-temporal feature fusion module that can be easily integrated into a transformer module for fusion purposes. Finally, we conduct benchmarking and extensive experiments on the Ev-Layout dataset, demonstrating that our approach significantly improves the accuracy of dynamic indoor layout estimation compared to existing event-based methods.

Revisiting Invariant Learning for Out-of-Domain Generalization on Multi-Site Mammogram Datasets

Despite significant progress in robust deep learning techniques for mammogram breast cancer classification, their reliability in real-world clinical development settings remains uncertain. The translation of these models to clinical practice faces challenges due to variations in medical centers, imaging protocols, and patient populations. To enhance their robustness, invariant learning methods have been proposed, prioritizing causal factors over misleading features. However, their effectiveness in clinical development and impact on mammogram classification require investigation. This paper reassesses the application of invariant learning for breast cancer risk estimation based on mammograms. Utilizing diverse multi-site public datasets, it represents the first study in this area. The objective is to evaluate invariant learning's benefits in developing robust models. Invariant learning methods, including Invariant Risk Minimization and Variance Risk Extrapolation, are compared quantitatively against Empirical Risk Minimization. Evaluation metrics include accuracy, average precision, and area under the curve. Additionally, interpretability is examined through class activation maps and visualization of learned representations. This research examines the advantages, limitations, and challenges of invariant learning for mammogram classification, guiding future studies to develop generalized methods for breast cancer prediction on whole mammograms in out-of-domain scenarios.

Heterogeneous bimodal attention fusion for speech emotion recognition

Multi-modal emotion recognition in conversations is a challenging problem due to the complex and complementary interactions between different modalities. Audio and textual cues are particularly important for understanding emotions from a human perspective. Most existing studies focus on exploring interactions between audio and text modalities at the same representation level. However, a critical issue is often overlooked: the heterogeneous modality gap between low-level audio representations and high-level text representations. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework called Heterogeneous Bimodal Attention Fusion (HBAF) for multi-level multi-modal interaction in conversational emotion recognition. The proposed method comprises three key modules: the uni-modal representation module, the multi-modal fusion module, and the inter-modal contrastive learning module. The uni-modal representation module incorporates contextual content into low-level audio representations to bridge the heterogeneous multi-modal gap, enabling more effective fusion. The multi-modal fusion module uses dynamic bimodal attention and a dynamic gating mechanism to filter incorrect cross-modal relationships and fully exploit both intra-modal and inter-modal interactions. Finally, the inter-modal contrastive learning module captures complex absolute and relative interactions between audio and text modalities. Experiments on the MELD and IEMOCAP datasets demonstrate that the proposed HBAF method outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Bimodal Connection Attention Fusion for Speech Emotion Recognition

Multi-modal emotion recognition is challenging due to the difficulty of extracting features that capture subtle emotional differences. Understanding multi-modal interactions and connections is key to building effective bimodal speech emotion recognition systems. In this work, we propose Bimodal Connection Attention Fusion (BCAF) method, which includes three main modules: the interactive connection network, the bimodal attention network, and the correlative attention network. The interactive connection network uses an encoder-decoder architecture to model modality connections between audio and text while leveraging modality-specific features. The bimodal attention network enhances semantic complementation and exploits intra- and inter-modal interactions. The correlative attention network reduces cross-modal noise and captures correlations between audio and text. Experiments on the MELD and IEMOCAP datasets demonstrate that the proposed BCAF method outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines.

Novel Object 6D Pose Estimation with a Single Reference View

Existing novel object 6D pose estimation methods typically rely on CAD models or dense reference views, which are both difficult to acquire. Using only a single reference view is more scalable, but challenging due to large pose discrepancies and limited geometric and spatial information. To address these issues, we propose a Single-Reference-based novel object 6D (SinRef-6D) pose estimation method. Our key idea is to iteratively establish point-wise alignment in the camera coordinate system based on state space models (SSMs). Specifically, iterative camera-space point-wise alignment can effectively handle large pose discrepancies, while our proposed RGB and Points SSMs can capture long-range dependencies and spatial information from a single view, offering linear complexity and superior spatial modeling capability. Once pre-trained on synthetic data, SinRef-6D can estimate the 6D pose of a novel object using only a single reference view, without requiring retraining or a CAD model. Extensive experiments on six popular datasets and real-world robotic scenes demonstrate that we achieve on-par performance with CAD-based and dense reference view-based methods, despite operating in the more challenging single reference setting. Code will be released at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/SinRef-6D.

Gungnir: Exploiting Stylistic Features in Images for Backdoor Attacks on Diffusion Models

In recent years, Diffusion Models (DMs) have demonstrated significant advances in the field of image generation. However, according to current research, DMs are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, which allow attackers to control the model's output by inputting data containing covert triggers, such as a specific patch or phrase. Existing defense strategies are well equipped to thwart such attacks through backdoor detection and trigger inversion because previous attack methods are constrained by limited input spaces and triggers defined by low-dimensional features. To bridge these gaps, we propose Gungnir, a novel method that enables attackers to activate the backdoor in DMs through hidden style triggers within input images. Our approach proposes using stylistic features as triggers for the first time and implements backdoor attacks successfully in image2image tasks by utilizing Reconstructing-Adversarial Noise (RAN) and Short-Term-Timesteps-Retention (STTR) of DMs. Meanwhile, experiments demonstrate that our method can easily bypass existing defense methods. Among existing DM main backdoor defense frameworks, our approach achieves a 0\% backdoor detection rate (BDR). Our codes are available at https://github.com/paoche11/Gungnir.

IU4Rec: Interest Unit-Based Product Organization and Recommendation for E-Commerce Platform

Most recommendation systems typically follow a product-based paradigm utilizing user-product interactions to identify the most engaging items for users. However, this product-based paradigm has notable drawbacks for Xianyu~\footnote{Xianyu is China's largest online C2C e-commerce platform where a large portion of the product are post by individual sellers}. Most of the product on Xianyu posted from individual sellers often have limited stock available for distribution, and once the product is sold, it's no longer available for distribution. This result in most items distributed product on Xianyu having relatively few interactions, affecting the effectiveness of traditional recommendation depending on accumulating user-item interactions. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{IU4Rec}, an \textbf{I}nterest \textbf{U}nit-based two-stage \textbf{Rec}ommendation system framework. We first group products into clusters based on attributes such as category, image, and semantics. These IUs are then integrated into the Recommendation system, delivering both product and technological innovations. IU4Rec begins by grouping products into clusters based on attributes such as category, image, and semantics, forming Interest Units (IUs). Then we redesign the recommendation process into two stages. In the first stage, the focus is on recommend these Interest Units, capturing broad-level interests. In the second stage, it guides users to find the best option among similar products within the selected Interest Unit. User-IU interactions are incorporated into our ranking models, offering the advantage of more persistent IU behaviors compared to item-specific interactions. Experimental results on the production dataset and online A/B testing demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed IU-centric recommendation approach.

When Data Manipulation Meets Attack Goals: An In-depth Survey of Attacks for VLMs

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have gained considerable prominence in recent years due to their remarkable capability to effectively integrate and process both textual and visual information. This integration has significantly enhanced performance across a diverse spectrum of applications, such as scene perception and robotics. However, the deployment of VLMs has also given rise to critical safety and security concerns, necessitating extensive research to assess the potential vulnerabilities these VLM systems may harbor. In this work, we present an in-depth survey of the attack strategies tailored for VLMs. We categorize these attacks based on their underlying objectives - namely jailbreak, camouflage, and exploitation - while also detailing the various methodologies employed for data manipulation of VLMs. Meanwhile, we outline corresponding defense mechanisms that have been proposed to mitigate these vulnerabilities. By discerning key connections and distinctions among the diverse types of attacks, we propose a compelling taxonomy for VLM attacks. Moreover, we summarize the evaluation metrics that comprehensively describe the characteristics and impact of different attacks on VLMs. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of promising future research directions that could further enhance the robustness and safety of VLMs, emphasizing the importance of ongoing exploration in this critical area of study. To facilitate community engagement, we maintain an up-to-date project page, accessible at: https://github.com/AobtDai/VLM_Attack_Paper_List.