Calibrated Decomposition of Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Deep Features for Inference-Time Adaptation

Most estimators collapse all uncertainty modes into a single confidence score, preventing reliable reasoning about when to allocate more compute or adjust inference. We introduce Uncertainty-Guided Inference-Time Selection, a lightweight inference time framework that disentangles aleatoric (data-driven) and epistemic (model-driven) uncertainty directly in deep feature space. Aleatoric uncertainty is estimated using a regularized global density model, while epistemic uncertainty is formed from three complementary components that capture local support deficiency, manifold spectral collapse, and cross-layer feature inconsistency. These components are empirically orthogonal and require no sampling, no ensembling, and no additional forward passes. We integrate the decomposed uncertainty into a distribution free conformal calibration procedure that yields significantly tighter prediction intervals at matched coverage. Using these components for uncertainty guided adaptive model selection reduces compute by approximately 60 percent on MOT17 with negligible accuracy loss, enabling practical self regulating visual inference. Additionally, our ablation results show that the proposed orthogonal uncertainty decomposition consistently yields higher computational savings across all MOT17 sequences, improving margins by 13.6 percentage points over the total-uncertainty baseline.

MoRA: Missing Modality Low-Rank Adaptation for Visual Recognition

Pre-trained vision language models have shown remarkable performance on visual recognition tasks, but they typically assume the availability of complete multimodal inputs during both training and inference. In real-world scenarios, however, modalities may be missing due to privacy constraints, collection difficulties, or resource limitations. While previous approaches have addressed this challenge using prompt learning techniques, they fail to capture the cross-modal relationships necessary for effective multimodal visual recognition and suffer from inevitable computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce MoRA, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that explicitly models cross-modal interactions while maintaining modality-specific adaptations. MoRA introduces modality-common parameters between text and vision encoders, enabling bidirectional knowledge transfer. Additionally, combined with the modality-specific parameters, MoRA allows the backbone model to maintain inter-modality interaction and enable intra-modality flexibility. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that MoRA achieves an average performance improvement in missing-modality scenarios by 5.24% and uses only 25.90% of the inference time compared to the SOTA method while requiring only 0.11% of trainable parameters compared to full fine-tuning.

Windsock is Dancing: Adaptive Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) has emerged as a promising method to generate factual and up-to-date responses of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by incorporating non-parametric knowledge from external knowledge bases. However, existing MRAG approaches suffer from static retrieval strategies, inflexible modality selection, and suboptimal utilization of retrieved information, leading to three critical challenges: determining when to retrieve, what modality to incorporate, and how to utilize retrieved information effectively. To address these challenges, we introduce Windsock, a query-dependent module making decisions on retrieval necessity and modality selection, effectively reducing computational overhead and improving response quality. Additionally, we propose Dynamic Noise-Resistance (DANCE) Instruction Tuning, an adaptive training strategy that enhances MLLMs' ability to utilize retrieved information while maintaining robustness against noise. Moreover, we adopt a self-assessment approach leveraging knowledge within MLLMs to convert question-answering datasets to MRAG training datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method significantly improves the generation quality by 17.07% while reducing 8.95% retrieval times.

ContraGS: Codebook-Condensed and Trainable Gaussian Splatting for Fast, Memory-Efficient Reconstruction

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a state-of-art technique to model real-world scenes with high quality and real-time rendering. Typically, a higher quality representation can be achieved by using a large number of 3D Gaussians. However, using large 3D Gaussian counts significantly increases the GPU device memory for storing model parameters. A large model thus requires powerful GPUs with high memory capacities for training and has slower training/rendering latencies due to the inefficiencies of memory access and data movement. In this work, we introduce ContraGS, a method to enable training directly on compressed 3DGS representations without reducing the Gaussian Counts, and thus with a little loss in model quality. ContraGS leverages codebooks to compactly store a set of Gaussian parameter vectors throughout the training process, thereby significantly reducing memory consumption. While codebooks have been demonstrated to be highly effective at compressing fully trained 3DGS models, directly training using codebook representations is an unsolved challenge. ContraGS solves the problem of learning non-differentiable parameters in codebook-compressed representations by posing parameter estimation as a Bayesian inference problem. To this end, ContraGS provides a framework that effectively uses MCMC sampling to sample over a posterior distribution of these compressed representations. With ContraGS, we demonstrate that ContraGS significantly reduces the peak memory during training (on average 3.49X) and accelerated training and rendering (1.36X and 1.88X on average, respectively), while retraining close to state-of-art quality.

TS-OOD: Evaluating Time-Series Out-of-Distribution Detection and Prospective Directions for Progress

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a fundamental challenge in the deployment of machine learning models. From a security standpoint, this is particularly important because OOD test data can result in misleadingly confident yet erroneous predictions, which undermine the reliability of the deployed model. Although numerous models for OOD detection have been developed in computer vision and language, their adaptability to the time-series data domain remains limited and under-explored. Yet, time-series data is ubiquitous across manufacturing and security applications for which OOD is essential. This paper seeks to address this research gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of modality-agnostic OOD detection algorithms. We evaluate over several multivariate time-series datasets, deep learning architectures, time-series specific data augmentations, and loss functions. Our results demonstrate that: 1) the majority of state-of-the-art OOD methods exhibit limited performance on time-series data, and 2) OOD methods based on deep feature modeling may offer greater advantages for time-series OOD detection, highlighting a promising direction for future time-series OOD detection algorithm development.

INRet: A General Framework for Accurate Retrieval of INRs for Shapes

Implicit neural representations (INRs) have become an important method for encoding various data types, such as 3D objects or scenes, images, and videos. They have proven to be particularly effective at representing 3D content, e.g., 3D scene reconstruction from 2D images, novel 3D content creation, as well as the representation, interpolation, and completion of 3D shapes. With the widespread generation of 3D data in an INR format, there is a need to support effective organization and retrieval of INRs saved in a data store. A key aspect of retrieval and clustering of INRs in a data store is the formulation of similarity between INRs that would, for example, enable retrieval of similar INRs using a query INR. In this work, we propose INRet, a method for determining similarity between INRs that represent shapes, thus enabling accurate retrieval of similar shape INRs from an INR data store. INRet flexibly supports different INR architectures such as INRs with octree grids, triplanes, and hash grids, as well as different implicit functions including signed/unsigned distance function and occupancy field. We demonstrate that our method is more general and accurate than the existing INR retrieval method, which only supports simple MLP INRs and requires the same architecture between the query and stored INRs. Furthermore, compared to converting INRs to other representations (e.g., point clouds or multi-view images) for 3D shape retrieval, INRet achieves higher accuracy while avoiding the conversion overhead.

Uncertainty Quantification in Continual Open-World Learning

AI deployed in the real-world should be capable of autonomously adapting to novelties encountered after deployment. Yet, in the field of continual learning, the reliance on novelty and labeling oracles is commonplace albeit unrealistic. This paper addresses a challenging and under-explored problem: a deployed AI agent that continuously encounters unlabeled data - which may include both unseen samples of known classes and samples from novel (unknown) classes - and must adapt to it continuously. To tackle this challenge, we propose our method COUQ "Continual Open-world Uncertainty Quantification", an iterative uncertainty estimation algorithm tailored for learning in generalized continual open-world multi-class settings. We rigorously apply and evaluate COUQ on key sub-tasks in the Continual Open-World: continual novelty detection, uncertainty guided active learning, and uncertainty guided pseudo-labeling for semi-supervised CL. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across multiple datasets, ablations, backbones and performance superior to state-of-the-art.

CONCLAD: COntinuous Novel CLAss Detector

In the field of continual learning, relying on so-called oracles for novelty detection is commonplace albeit unrealistic. This paper introduces CONCLAD ("COntinuous Novel CLAss Detector"), a comprehensive solution to the under-explored problem of continual novel class detection in post-deployment data. At each new task, our approach employs an iterative uncertainty estimation algorithm to differentiate between known and novel class(es) samples, and to further discriminate between the different novel classes themselves. Samples predicted to be from a novel class with high-confidence are automatically pseudo-labeled and used to update our model. Simultaneously, a tiny supervision budget is used to iteratively query ambiguous novel class predictions, which are also used during update. Evaluation across multiple datasets, ablations and experimental settings demonstrate our method's effectiveness at separating novel and old class samples continuously. We will release our code upon acceptance.

CUAL: Continual Uncertainty-aware Active Learner

AI deployed in many real-world use cases should be capable of adapting to novelties encountered after deployment. Here, we consider a challenging, under-explored and realistic continual adaptation problem: a deployed AI agent is continuously provided with unlabeled data that may contain not only unseen samples of known classes but also samples from novel (unknown) classes. In such a challenging setting, it has only a tiny labeling budget to query the most informative samples to help it continuously learn. We present a comprehensive solution to this complex problem with our model "CUAL" (Continual Uncertainty-aware Active Learner). CUAL leverages an uncertainty estimation algorithm to prioritize active labeling of ambiguous (uncertain) predicted novel class samples while also simultaneously pseudo-labeling the most certain predictions of each class. Evaluations across multiple datasets, ablations, settings and backbones (e.g. ViT foundation model) demonstrate our method's effectiveness. We will release our code upon acceptance.

Rate-Distortion Theory in Coding for Machines and its Application

Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in both the capability and popularity of automatic machine analysis of images and video. As a result, a growing need for efficient compression methods optimized for machine vision, rather than human vision, has emerged. To meet this growing demand, several methods have been developed for image and video coding for machines. Unfortunately, while there is a substantial body of knowledge regarding rate-distortion theory for human vision, the same cannot be said of machine analysis. In this paper, we extend the current rate-distortion theory for machines, providing insight into important design considerations of machine-vision codecs. We then utilize this newfound understanding to improve several methods for learnable image coding for machines. Our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance on several computer vision tasks such as classification, instance segmentation, and object detection.